clock | September 10, 2009On Speaking of Medicine:
PLoS Medicine turns 5 years old on October 19th, 2009. To highlight the crucial importance of open access in medical publishing we're holding a competition to find the best medical paper published under an open-access license anywhere (not just in PLoS) since our launch.
Vote for your choice from the 6 competing papers, detailed below -- nominated and then shortlisted by our editorial board. Winners will be announced during Open-Access week (19-23rd October 2009). If you're interested in how we came up with this shortlist of top-quality open-access medicine papers,…
clock | September 10, 2009I have been remiss this week....so here's a sampling from all seven PLoS journals over the course of this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Classical Morphology of Plants as an Elementary Instance of Classical Invariant Theory:
It has long been known that structural chemistry…
clock | September 10, 2009Best Slideshow About Social Media:
What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later
View more documents from Marta Kagan.
The follow-up to this., from Berci
clock | September 10, 2009At the NC Museum of Natural Sciences:
What's Bugging You? Animals We Love to Hate
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
8:00 - 10:00 am with discussion beginning at 9:00 followed by Q&A
Location: The Acro Cafe - 4th Floor of the Museum of Natural Sciences
Fire ants. Mosquitoes. Flies. Ticks. Gnats. Bed Bugs. The list goes on and on.
They disturb our sleep, sting us, envenomate us, suck our blood, eat our food, crawl on us...yet at the same time, they pollinate our food and flowers, provide insect control, and increase biodiversity. So, what is a pest? Are some of these pests invasive…
clock | September 9, 2009Quiet minds can't be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
clock | September 9, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 360 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth
2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…
clock | September 9, 2009Professor Nicky Clayton researches the social behaviour, intelligence and dance credentials of birds! As an accomplished dancer in her own right she has fused her passions by collaborating with Rambert Dance Company to produce a Darwinian inspired ballet called The Comedy of Change.
clock | September 9, 2009Tuesday, September 22, 2009
6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 833-8898
Memory problems have become increasingly common as our population ages. The fear of developing dementia is one of the greatest fears of most Americans. There can be memory changes as one grows older, but what determines if these changes are benign versus the beginning of a dementia process like Alzheimer's disease? We will discuss types of memory, the neurobiological basis of memory, and ways to tell normal aging from the…
clock | September 9, 2009Carnival of the Blue XXVIII is up on The Saipan Blog
Four Stone Hearth #75 is up on Ad Hominin
clock | September 8, 2009My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
clock | September 8, 2009I know everyone in the sci-blogosphere is swooning over Carl Sagan. But as a kid I never cared much about him - I usually fell asleep halfway through each episode of 'Cosmos'. But I would not miss for anything an episode of 'The Underwater Odyssey of Commander Cousteau' with Jacques-Yves Cousteau. That was breathtaking. And what he and the crew of Calypso did was truly ground-breaking, both in terms of scientific discoveries and in terms of under-water filming. And those discoveries and breakthroughs were shared with us, the audience, in an intimate and immediate manner.
That was a long time…
clock | September 8, 2009September Scientiae is up on Journeys of an Academic
Grand Rounds Vol. 5 No. 51 are up on Medic 999
clock | September 8, 2009
Dinosaur fossils have been dug out for a couple of centuries now. They have been cleaned up and mounted in museums and described in papers and monographs. The way this is all done has evolved over time - the early techniques were pretty crude compared to what palaeontologists do today. One of the important techniques is actually quite simple: making measurements of bones. And yes, many such bones have been measured and the measurements reported in the literature. And that literature is scattered all over the place in many different formats in many different journals. Nobody has put all the…
clock | September 8, 2009And blog from there? For the Quark expedition!
The voting has been going on for quite a while now, but now we are in the final stretch. There are several hundred contestants, but only the top few vote-getters have a chance (they also need to pass an in-person interview).
The voting is well controlled - it requires a simple registration - so it is not possible to game the system (too much). It is also possible to change your vote, so if you have already voted for someone who now has no chance, you may want to switch to someone who has.
Several people at the top are good (including Danielle…
clock | September 7, 2009That, if then I had waked after a long sleep,
will make me sleep again;
and then, in dreaming,
the clouds me thought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me;
that, when I waked I cried to dream again.
- William Shakespeare
clock | September 7, 2009I am superhappy with my brand new Homepage. So now I want to do all sorts of fixin' around here.
The About page was horrendously out-dated so I did some quick fixes and edits to make it a little less embarrassing, though it probably needs a complete rethinking and rewriting from scratch one of these days.
But what should I do with the Blogroll?!?!
It is huge. And it is so out-of-date. And unmanageable. So many broken and dead links. Blogs that have quit months or years ago. And lacking so many blogs that I read now.
Option 1) delete the whole thing (nobody uses blogrolls any more)
Option 2)…
clock | September 7, 2009Zombies of the mammoth steppes. Read it now. Can you find something as riveting, yet scholarly and trustworthy, in your newspaper today?