clock | June 3, 2009One way to make sure everyone gets to work on time would be to have 95 parking spaces for every 100 employees.
- Michael Iapoce
clock | June 3, 2009
Scientists Map Penguins From Space By Locating Their Feces:
Penguin poo (guano) stains, visible from space, have helped British scientists locate emperor penguin breeding colonies in Antarctica. Knowing their location provides a baseline for monitoring their response to environmental change.
New Hominid 12 Million Years Old Found In Spain, With 'Modern' Facial Features:
Researchers have discovered a fossilized face and jaw from a previously unknown hominoid primate genus in Spain dating to the Middle Miocene era, roughly 12 million years ago. Nicknamed "Lluc," the male bears a strikingly "…
clock | June 2, 2009Do not think of your faults, still less of others' faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
- John Ruskin
clock | June 2, 2009There are 23 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 day - you go and look for your own favourites:
The Emergence of Predators in Early Life: There was No Garden of Eden:
Eukaryote cells are suggested to arise somewhere between 0.85~2.7 billion years ago. However, in the present world of unicellular…
clock | June 2, 2009The Science of Chocolate
Tuesday, June 16, 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
From drinks to desserts, chocolate is a favorite that is loved by cultures worldwide. Can a food as delicious as chocolate also be good for your health? Join us to learn about the history of chocolate from ancient times to modern day manufacturing, and find out what current research is telling us about the science of this special food.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Gabriel Keith Harris is an Assistant Professor…
clock | June 2, 2009Caryn Shechtman, one of the two bloggers at the New York blog and manager of the New York City Hub at Nature Network, called me up last week and interviewed me for the blog. The interview - on a range of topics, but mostly about blogging - is now published and you can read it here.
clock | June 2, 2009Light-treatment Device To Improve Sleep Quality In The Elderly:
Sleep disturbances increase as we age. Some studies report more than half of seniors 65 years of age or older suffer from chronic sleep disturbances. Researchers have long believed that the sleep disturbances common among the elderly often result from a disruption of the body's circadian rhythms -- biological cycles that repeat approximately every 24 hours.
High Arctic Mammals Wintered In Darkness 53 Million Years Ago:
Ancestors of tapirs and ancient cousins of rhinos living above the Arctic Circle 53 million years ago endured…
clock | June 2, 2009Carnival of Evolution #12 is up on Deep Sea News
Carnival of the Green #182 is up on Green Building Elements
Grand Rounds Vol. 5 No. 37 are up on Health Blawg
clock | June 1, 2009The entries are listed and linked here. Go and vote here.
If you are interested in voting for me (but there are many other good choices, of course), know that to date the Archaea post got 0 votes, the Shock-Value got 2 and the others got 1 vote each. Perhaps we can do better (it appears impossible to vote more than once, so choose wisely).
clock | June 1, 2009There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today, as well as 12 articles published Friday night. 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:
The Multifaceted Origin of Taurine Cattle Reflected by the Mitochondrial Genome:
A Neolithic domestication of taurine cattle in the Fertile Crescent from local…
clock | June 1, 2009First June Scientia Pro Publica is up on Pro-science
Circus of the Spineless #39 is up on Bug Girl's Blog
Berry Go Round #17 is up on Gravity's Rainbow
Festival of the Trees - Edition 36 is up on Roundrock Journal
The 105th Carnival of Space is up on Space Disco
Friday Ark #245 is up on Modulator
clock | June 1, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 150 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes, 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: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks!
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?
A Blog Around The Clock:…
clock | June 1, 2009If you read this blog even superficially, you are probably aware of everyONE, the community blog of PLoS ONE. The blog has been so successful, that our colleagues at PLoS Medicine have decided to follow our example and start their own community blog.
And, today they are ready to reveal - Speaking of Medicine. Go check it out - click on all the tabs on top for all the additional information. Bookmark and subscribed. Spread the word about it. And come back often and use it - and post comments.
clock | June 1, 2009About a week ago, Nicholas Kristof wrote an eye-opening op-ed in NYTimes - After Wars, Mass Rapes Persist. In Liberia, and probably in some other places, the end of war does not automatically mean the end of rape:
Of course, children are raped everywhere, but what is happening in Liberia is different. The war seems to have shattered norms and trained some men to think that when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl. Or at school, girls sometimes find that to get good grades, they must have sex with their teachers.
The war, and the use of rape as a weapon of war, changes the…
clock | June 1, 2009The World is a radio show co-produced by WGBH Boston, Public Radio International and BBC. You can probably hear it on your local NPR station - if not, you can find all the shows recorded on the website.
You may remember that I went to Boston a couple of months ago, as part of a team of people helping the show do something special: use the NSF grant they recently received to expand their science coverage and, in collaboration with Sigma Xi and NOVA, tie their radio science coverage to their online offerings.
The result is The World: Science website, a series of weekly science podcasts with…