clock | June 11, 2009Make sure you never, never argue at night. You just lose a good night's sleep, and you can't settle anything until morning anyway.
- Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
clock | June 11, 2009There are 16 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 Standard System to Study Vertebrate Embryos:
Staged embryonic series are important as reference for different kinds of biological studies. I summarise problems that occur when using 'staging tables' of '…
clock | June 11, 2009I And The Bird #102 is up on Birder's Lounge
June edition of Change of Shift is up on Florence dot com
Grand Rounds, Volume 5, Number 38 are up on The Jobbing Doctor
And there are only a couple of days left until the next Giant's Shoulders, so try to write and send in something appropriate on History Of Science.
clock | June 11, 2009Circadian Rhythm: How Cells Tell Time:
The fuzzy pale mold that lines the glass tubes in Dr. Yi Liu's lab doesn't look much like a clock. But this fungus has an internal, cell-based timekeeper nearly as sophisticated as a human's, allowing UT Southwestern Medical Center physiologists to study easily the biochemistry and genetics of body clocks, or circadian rhythms. In a new study appearing online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Liu and his co-workers have found that this mold, which uses a protein called FRQ as the main gear of its clock, marks time by a…
clock | June 10, 2009If I thought there was some reason to be concerned about them, I wouldn't be sleeping in this house tonight. (When asked about continued presence of Soviet nuclear submarines along US coastlines)
- Ronald Wilson Reagan
clock | June 10, 2009As the boundaries between formal and informal scientific communication is blurring - think of pre-print sites, Open Notebook Science and blogs, for starters - the issue of what is citable and how it should be cited is becoming more and more prominent.
There is a very interesting discussion on this topic in the comments section at the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog, discussing the place of science blogs in the new communication ecosystem and if a blog post can be and should be cited. What counts as a "real publication"? Is the use of the phrase "real publication" in itself…
clock | June 10, 2009There are 17 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:
PER3 Polymorphism Predicts Cumulative Sleep Homeostatic but Not Neurobehavioral Changes to Chronic Partial Sleep Deprivation:
The variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphism 5-repeat allele of the…
clock | June 10, 2009
I guess that is it's purpose. The very first pic I took with the new iPhone. Around the corner here in Chapel Hill.
clock | June 10, 2009From SCONC:
Science Cafe
July 14, 2009 | 7:00 P.M.
Uncovering the Mysteries of Human Fertility: On Sex, Fertile Days, and Why the Rabbit Dies
Speaker: Allen Wilcox, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
Everyone knows where babies come from, but few people appreciate the extraordinary and in some cases completely weird processes that have to work right in order for a new life to form.
Dr. Wilcox will discuss the key steps of human conception and early pregnancy including the window of days in which a woman can conceive, some of the factors that affect a couple's chances of…
clock | June 10, 2009Genetic Region For Tame Animals Discovered: Horse Whisperers, Lion Tamers Not Needed:
In what could be a breakthrough in animal breeding, a team of scientists from Germany, Russia and Sweden have discovered a set of genetic regions responsible for animal tameness. This discovery, published in the June 2009 issue of the journal Genetics, should help animal breeders, farmers, zoologists, and anyone else who handles and raises animals to more fully understand what makes some animals interact with humans better than do others. It may also lead to more precise breeding strategies designed to pass…
clock | June 9, 2009It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.
- Psalm 127:2 Bible
clock | June 9, 2009Since my post about it is not on the front page any more, I just want to remind you of the groundswell of support for the Silence Is The Enemy initiative.
Join the Facebook group, donate to Doctors Without Borders and write a letter to your representatives. Join the blogger coalition by blogging about this and spreading the word.
Small help is better than no help. And in many cases, growing coverage of an issue in the blogosphere forces the corporate media to break the silence as well, start paying attention and start covering it. Then, once it is in MSM, the elected officials start noticing…
clock | June 9, 2009Today, we unveil a brand new PLoS ONE Collection - the Prokaryotic Genome Collection. The Collection was edited by Niyaz Ahmed, who wrote an introductory Overview.
In other news, there are 17 new articles published last night and another 17 new articles published tonight in PLoS ONE. 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…
clock | June 9, 2009I am not the only one on ScienceBlogs.com to write about circadian rhythms, sleep and (non-visual) photoreception. Over the years, my SciBlings have written about these and related topics as well. Here is a sampler - go and dig for more on their blogs.
Stimulant Improves Sleep
Locked-In Syndrome
Opioids and Sleep Disorders
Home Testing for Sleep Apnea?
Pure Hypomanics: Living Zippedy Doo Dah Lives?
SFN Update: Sleep Deprivation Impacts Memory, Reduces Hippocampal Activity
Data Faker Turns Himself In
Agomelatine: A New Approach For Depression
Casual Fridays: Dave FINALLY finishes analyzing the…
clock | June 9, 2009When I go to the Lindau Nobel meeting in Germany in a few weeks, I will not only report from there as a blogger. I was also asked to participate on a panel about Open Access publishing:
"Beatrice Lugger, German science journalist (and founder of Scienceblogs Germany), will moderate this panel. The panelists are: Nobel Laureates Aaron Ciechanover and Sir Harold Kroto, Bora Zivkovic of PLoS, and Dr Jason Wilde, publisher for the physical sciences at Nature Publishing Group."
clock | June 9, 2009And it is good. Much longer than #1 and interesting to all of us who have kids heavily involved in playing computer games:
Whenever kids are involved in a violent crime, speculation about their upbringing inevitably takes center stage. Were they abused or neglected? Could their parents have prevented the tragedy? Most recently, video games have been targeted as the possible root of the problem. But are video games really to blame for horrific massacres like the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech? This month's report considers the growing role video games play in our kids' lives--and…
clock | June 9, 2009Go say Hello to Walt Crawford at Walt at Random.
Walt is Editorial Director for the Library Leadership Network and also publishes an e-journal Cites & Insights. You can get a taste for his blogging on his old blog, of course.
clock | June 9, 2009It will not take more than a couple of minutes. Just go to this Sheril's post and follow the directions. She will use the results of the quiz to inform experimental design for an interesting project on the neuroscience of kissing. This will then be included in her next book.