clock | June 29, 2009Wojciech Supronowicz
A brief interview with one of the young researchers attending the Lindau Nobel conference - Wojciech Supronowicz from Poland:
clock | June 29, 2009Because a fellow has failed once or twice, or a dozen times, you don't want to set him down as a failure till he's dead or loses his courage - and that's the same thing.
- George Lorimer
clock | June 29, 2009Considering I've been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined the term "biological clock" itself before, despite using it all the time.
Since the science bloggers started writing the 'basic concepts and terms' posts recently, I've been thinking about the best way to define 'biological clock' and it is not easy! Let me try, under the fold:
A biological clock is a structure that times regular re-occurence of…
clock | June 29, 2009I have arrived. The trip was OK. Terminal 2 at RDU rocks - I was there far too early (due to trip-excites) and spent 3 hours online on my iPhone. At Heathrow, wifi is pay-only, and I could not detect any at the Zurich airport. There is no AT&T signal to be picked up at Heathrow, Zurich or Lindau, so I am not using the iPhone at all. The wifi at the hotel is decent (a little slower than at home) and they say that it is much better at the conference center.
For some reason, AA switched airplane types. I was looking forward to sleeping 7 hours on the B777 (it is never completely full so I…
clock | June 29, 2009Eric Michael Johnson has moved his blog Primate Diaries from blogspot to NN and today to http://scienceblogs.com/photosynthesis/2009/06/rocks_that_rock.php. w00t!
Photo Synthesis, the Sb photoblog gets a new contributor every month or so. B Jefferson Bolender started today.
clock | June 29, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Glendon Mellow of the The Flying Trilobite, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I'm yet another Canadian atheist artist-illustrator recovering goth-punk who blogs about incorrectly…
clock | June 29, 2009 This is the first in a series of posts from Circadiana designed as ClockTutorials, covering the basics of the field of Chronobiology. It was first written on January 12, 2005:
There are traditionally three approaches to research and teaching of physiology: biochemical, energetic, and homeostatic. The three are by no means exclusive and all good physiologists will include all three in their work and teaching, but each with a different emphasis.
Biochemical approach is typical of human/medical physiology. Physiological mechanisms are described at lower and lower levels, until the molecules…
clock | June 28, 2009The ability to relate and to connect, sometimes in odd and yet striking fashion, lies at the very heart of any creative use of the mind, no matter in what field or discipline.
- George J. Seidel
clock | June 28, 2009This is a repost of an November 6, 2007 post (as always, click on the icon to see the original and its comments):
Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry.
But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science has become such a collaborative enterprise and single-author papers are becoming a rarity, when a 12-author paper turns no heads and 100-author papers are showing up more and more, it has become necessary to put…
clock | June 28, 2009A repost of a November 28, 2008 post:
The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become more effective in communicating Norwegian science to their constituents and internationally.
Some of the things Chris said were surprising, others not as much. In my mind, I was comparing what he said to what I learned back in April when I went back to Serbia and talked to some scientists there. It…
clock | June 27, 2009Wives in their husbands' absences grow subtler,
And daughters sometimes run off with the butler.
- George Gordon Noel Byron
clock | June 27, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 180 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):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks!
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…
clock | June 27, 2009A post from December 5, 2007:
Communication
Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I used above has two meanings - one negative, one positive. In a negative meaning, a constraint imposes limits and makes certain directions less likely, more difficult or impossible. In its positive meaning, constraint means that some directions are easy and obvious and…
clock | June 27, 2009A couple of months ago, my SciBling David Dobbs and I recorded about an hour of discussion for Bloggingheads.tv. We talked mainly about science journalism, but also about journalism in general, about the future of the book, etc.
Unfortunately, Dave's half of the file got broken beyond repair, so the show never aired. I kept my half of the file and did not really know what to do with it. So, recently I downloaded Audacity and tried my hand at editing the audio part of the file, trying to cut out the silences (during which Dave was talking) and dialogues that would be intelligible without Dave'…
clock | June 26, 2009There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats.
- Anonymous
clock | June 26, 2009As you may already be aware I am about to embark on a trip to Europe again. I will be traveling on Sunday and arriving at Lindau, Germany on Monday for the 59th Meeting of Nobel Laureates. The list of Nobel Laureates (23 of them) and the list of about 600 young researchers from 66 countries are very impressive. Of course, not being a chemist, I'll have to do some homework before I go (I printed out the complete list of descriptions of all of them to read on the airplane), learning what these people did to get their prizes and what the younger ones are doing hoping to get a Nobel in the future…
clock | June 26, 2009There are 15 new articles in PLoS ONE today. 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:
A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures:
The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved…