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You may be wondering why I have been so sentimental even though the year is not over yet. I am happy to inform you that it is not because I am retiring. On the contrary, I am packing up my virtual bags and moving this blog to a new site! Pardon the dust while we get settled into our new digs.
I came across the "I Spy Physiology" blog today from the American Physiological Society. The blog focuses on physiological topics relevant to daily life. There are also a couple of comparative physiology gems in the blog that you can view using the links below: How birds my help us understand diabetes How research on walking stick insects may help us to understand how the brain times leg contractions to regulate walking Pretty neat stuff!
"Actually, I wasn't happy or sad. I was medium. And medium is the happiest that I'll ever be." -Axe Cop It's been an amazing journey over the years, sharing the joys and wonders of the Universe with you. From the smallest subatomic particles, the most fundamental interactions and the shortest timescales imaginable to the stars, galaxies, clusters, superclusters and beyond, we've spent the better part of the last five years together here on ScienceBlogs exploring the most interesting aspects of physical reality together. Image credit: NASA, ESA, F. Paresce (INAF-IASF), R. O'Connell (UVa), and…
The lights are out at Effect Measure. It is closed and locked. No one is there any more. So consider this a note tacked on the door. I had always intended to leave it as a way to connect you with The Pump Handle and that's still its purpose. But now I feel compelled to add a thank you note as well. Shortly after publishing the final post I went off to my university's commencement. Of all the duties of a university faculty member, this is one of the nicest and happiest, the moment where we send our intellectual offspring into the world to do good on their own. The students who receive their…
It's been a long time coming but the time has come. Effect Measure is closing up shop, after 5 and a half years, 3 million visits and 5.1 million page views of some 3500. You commented on them some 37,000 times. It's been a grand ride but to all things there is a season. It's time to simplify my life and while my family has had me all along, at times science got short shrift. Now my time is getting short and I want to turn my attention to my research, the other polar star of my life. "Revere" will continue to post occasionally on Effect Measure's successor site, The Pump Handle (TPH), which…
The person who taps the keys here over the signature "revere" (or sometimes "Revere"; it's at most one at a time) is not Paul Revere. The real Paul Revere died in 1818. If you want to know the name or names of any of the key tappers here I'm going to disappoint you right away. This post doesn't reveal how many people do the tapping or who they are. If you are a regular reader you already know quite a bit about us -- in fact much more than about many people whose names you know (or think you know; if you read a news by-line do you really know who wrote the article?). While sometimes there is…
If you link to this weblog from your weblog, please update links: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/ If you have not updated your feeds, please do so now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionBlog The old feed address will point for another week or so to the new feed, but eventually it will cease working.
Update your bookmarks: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxpAnd RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionBlog If you have a weblog that links to ScienceBlogs GNXP, I would appreciate you update the link for the sake of PageRank. There isn't much to say about the move. There wasn't one big precipitating reason, a variety of reasons coalesced to make this the right thing to do for me. I would like to give a shout out to Erin Johnson, who from what I recall has been the longest serving ScienceBlogs community manager in the history of the website. One bittersweet aspect of leaving the…
A week ago I observed that commenting was being transformed with the spread of Disqus and Echo. The Big Money has now introduced Echo: The comments themselves are also more interactive. Any of your postings can be shared with your friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, or any of your connections on the other supported services. You can also reply to fellow commenters, tell them you like their posts, or flag any inappropriate or spam messages that you see. All commenters have their own profiles, which you can find by clicking on their profile names and viewing their details. There you'll…
14th season begins tonight. The website. You can usually get the episode a bit earlier at Allabout-SP.net.
Blogs, as Carl Zimmer astutely noted at this year's ScienceOnline conference, are software. Despite all the hand-wringing over whether science bloggers can or should replace science journalists the fact of the matter is that science blogs are the independent expressions of a variety of writers about subjects which they feel passionate about. There is no single science blog archetype that all blogs must fit, and this flexibility allows science writers the freedom to compose and promote their work in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Hindsight being what it is, of course, I can look…
Felix Salmon, Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ: The problem, here, is that the bloggers at places like the NYT and the WSJ are print reporters, and aren't really bloggers at heart. I discovered this a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a long and detailed blog entry on the court case between JP Morgan and Mexico's Cablevisión. The WSJ's Deal Journal blog didn't link to it, but a couple of days later, the blog's lead writer, Michael Corkery, had a piece in the print version of the newspaper which added nothing to the story, quoted the same Cablevisión executive that I had spoken to,…
Last spring I posted a review of Scitable at Nature. Since then Scitable seems to have expanded a bit, and I have given some more thought on its possible role in the ecology of the infosphere. Back in 2004 when I began to use Wikipedia regularly I was very impressed by the quality of the technical articles, but now that it's 2010 I have to say that far too often the Wikipedia entries are a bit thin in some domains. I suspect that my own expectations have started to outrun what is possible with Wikipedia, and probably I notice the "lack" because I've stopped going to Google as the first option…
For various reasons it was no longer feasible to run the Gene Expression Classic website on Blogger. So I've switched over to WP. Please update your RSS feeds if you are subscribed to that blog: http://www.gnxp.com/wp/feed