Blogging
razib | June 3, 2009Dan MacArthur of Genetics Future is at the center of a minor controversy because of his blogging The Biology of Genomes conference. Realistically it seems updating pre-internet protocols is just a band-aid solution. And the issues aren't particular to blogging conferences, they're general to the ease and fluidity with which information can flow today.
sjurvetson | May 11, 2009As the sun sets on a wonderful set of insect photos from the Wild...
I thought I should start with a transition photo, on a photosynthetic bug bed, to a new photo theme - rockets:
Many insects have served as brave cosmonauts - flying as a somewhat unwilling payload in Estes rockets. The National Association of Rocketry has rules against living payloads, but they make an exception for invertebrates. (I think the intent of the rule was to prevent kids from flying their sister's pet, but to allow for some curious exploration.)
The Quark is the smallest rocket I have built, with rear-swept…
oracknows | May 8, 2009I know, I know it seems like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, but some creature that I can't identify is having a fight somewhere in the neighborhood, freaking out my dog, and now I can't go back to sleep; so why not blog? In any case, I found out last week that Jenny McCarthy is on Twitter as JennyfromMTV.
Now, when I first saw it, I thought it had to be a spoof, someone pretending to be Jenny. No one could be as inane as to Tweet things like:
Im inside a hyperbaric chamber. This thing makes me feel amazing.
About to fly to jersey. Security stole my sugar free jelly out of my purse…
sb admin | May 5, 2009A few days ago I noticed the search term "Malagasy Mystery Ant" showing up in the stats for my other blog. This puzzled me, as it wasn't a phrase I was familiar with. So I googled it.
All mentions of the term trace back to a caption in the New York Times slide show from last week. Goodness. I- your humble blogger- had coined it myself, in a haze of deadline fever while submitting images for the slide show. And then, apparently, I forgot all about it.
Mystrium oberthueri
Am I going senile already? I hope not.
The problem with insects is their sheer number. There are millions of…
sb admin | April 20, 2009This clumsy photoshop job over at Pharyngula puts me in mind of one of my favorite blogs, Photoshop Disasters.
Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for the hours of time you will waste over there.
sb admin | April 16, 2009
An Amblyopone oregonensis huntress delivers a paralyzing dose of venom to a centipede. This lets the ant larvae consume it alive later, at their leisure. Ow. Ow, Ow. Yes, that is the stinger you see, sunk deep into the head.
A cricket is impaled on the mandibles of a Malagasy trap-jaw ant, Odontomachus coquereli. That's gotta hurt.
Mantids don't wait for their prey to expire before they tear them to pieces.
An aphid receives the egg of a braconid wasp (Aphidius ervi).
But that's probably better than getting your innards suddenly schlorped out by a syrphid fly larva.
rallain | April 9, 2009This post has nothing to do with physics, so if you are only into physicsy stuff, skip this. The primary goal of this post is to list what I need to blog. The secondary goal is to rant about my laptop.
I destroyed my laptop (well, not really, but kind of). Basically, I had a tooth pulled on Tuesday. It wasn't bad, really it wasn't. The doctor said I should be ok to teach lab after the pull, so I did. NOTE: DON'T EVER DO THAT. Teaching lab after getting a tooth pulled = bad idea. Really bad. Nothing like not being able to talk while drooling blood. I think I scared my students.
After…
sb admin | April 9, 2009Hello Science Blogs! I am Alex Wild, and insofar as Photo Synthesis is concerned, Mr. April. No centerfolds, fortunately for you. I normally blog elsewhere, but I am here at Photo Synthesis for the month and honored that the Science Blogs crew chose me as their inaugural photoblogger.
I became a photographer by accident. As an entomologist, several years ago I started posting photographs of my six-legged study subjects to my web site, naively unaware of the market for science photography. After a time I began hearing from textbook publishers and photo editors interested in licensing…
edyong | April 8, 2009In which, having largely stayed out of it, I wade into the ongoing rivalry between bloggers and more mainstream forms of science writing...
The latest round in this seemingly endless debate was a review by New Scientist of Open Lab 2008, an anthology of the best science blogging from the last year. Others, including Brian Switek and SciCurious, have touched on the specific criticisms levied by the review, but I wanted to pick up on the more general issue it raised - namely the relative merits and pitfalls of science blogs compared to mainstream science writing.
I am increasingly uneasy with…
oracknows | April 2, 2009While I'm trying to hammer my grant application into good enough shape to show my collaborator and given that it's been nearly a year since I did this last, now seems as good a time as any to have an open thread. Say your piece.
Oh, and by the way, I see that HIV/AIDS denialists have infested Tara's brief post about Christine Maggiore. While you're waiting for more pearls of insolence from the fevered mind of Orac, you might want to give her some tactical air support.
sb admin | March 23, 2009Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow, March 24, is Ada Lovelace Day, a day devoted to highlighting women in technology. Get your posts together! (Even if you didn't sign the pledge, please join in on the fun!) Details on how to post and tag are here.
I am so excited about my own post---the woman I am posting about totally rocks, and I can't wait to introduce you to her and her work.
Also, while we are on the subject of reminders: If you're not familiar with fellow scibling Isis the Scientist....well, why the hell aren't you reading her already? Anyway, you definitely want to click…
sheril | March 20, 2009Today Bora, Abel, and I visited Duke's Sanford Institute on Public Policy for the second year in a row to discuss the coverage of science, health, and policy. We chatted with a group of undergraduates about the evolution of science blogs, the emergence of blogging networks, the role of science blogs vs the MSM, and where open-access fits in. Our beloved scibling Isis even made a guest appearance via gchat!
We had a lot of fun and special thanks to GenomeBoy for inviting us to explore ideas with his terrific class! The other 'Beacons of the Bloggerati' had cameras, so photo to come.
After…
bioephemera | March 19, 2009
Illustration by David Parkins, Nature
Today, Nature released a news feature by Geoff Brumfiel on the downturn in mainstream science media. We've all known that this is happening; the alarms become impossible to ignore when Peter Dysktra and his team at CNN lost their jobs last year. For mainstream outlets like CNN or the Boston Globe to cut science may seem appalling - but in an unforgiving economic climate which has already triggered the collapse of major newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, such cuts are logical, because science reporting isn't a big money-maker. The question…
oracknows | March 13, 2009...well, not really.
It's just that I wanted to welcome the newest addition to the ScienceBlogs Collective, Dr. Erik Klemetti, a geologist who spends most of his professional time thinking about magma, and likes to blog about it at Eruptions.
Check it out, and enjoy!
sb admin | March 12, 2009Um, hi. Apparently I've been gone for a while. Yeah. Sorry about that. Life's been a bit crazy around here lately, and I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water. I'm not sleeping. I'm not taking care of myself. I'm sick. I'm stressed to the gills. I have way too much to do. I feel like I work all the damn time. Hmmm, maybe that's because I *do* work all the damn time.
In addition to not having time to breathe blog, I haven't really been in the headspace to blog. I have a ton of stuff on my mind, but I'm not sure how to blog it. It's all about tenure, of course: the…
sb admin | February 25, 2009I'm supervising a few independent studies this year, with groups of students working on fairly large and fairly fuzzily-defined design projects. These groups couldn't be more different from each other in terms of the way they act as a group, act as individuals, and interact with me. It's got me thinking a lot lately about group dynamics among students and the strong influences that certain individuals have over the behavior of the entire group.
One of the groups is highly functional---on the surface. The students all get along really well with each other and appear to complement each other…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Poor Jeni Barnett.
You remember Jeni Barnett, don't you? She's the U.K. radio host whose ill-informed rants against vaccines Ben Goldacre exposed so gloriously last week. Unfortunately, the price Ben paid consisted of threats of legal action for "copyright infringement" in the form of his having posted audio of the relevant segment of Barnett's show. Yes, LBC, the radio station on which Barnett's show runs, threatened to sue, forcing Ben to take down the audio. However, as almost always happens when a blogger is threatened in such a manner, the specter of legal action led to the audio files…
oracknows | January 26, 2009
When I mentioned a while back that, although I like awards as much as the next guy, I don't go actively seeking them, I wasn't kidding. As evidence that I wasn't kidding, I point out that, until some of you started letting me know about it, I had no clue that I had actually won the 2008 Medical Weblog Award for Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog of 2008. In fact, even though I do peruse Medgaget, the blog that hosts the competition, I had somehow missed the post last Friday announcing the winners.
Of course, it would have helped if the Medgadget guys would have shot me a quick e-mail.
In…
amillikan | January 26, 2009
Last Thursday, I entered The Research Triangle for the ScienceOnline09 conference. It was a place of both shadow and substance, both things and ideas. It was a place where the cryptic elements of the blogosphere manifested in three dimensions; personalities known only through pixelated text subject to the imagination took on faces and voices that would forever alter my perception of the messages flashing next to the user names I encounter every day as an administrator of ScienceBlogs. But unlike The Bermuda Triangle where people are rumored to disappear due to the activities of paranormal…