Open Lab 2009 and Research Blogging Awards

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I 'M pleased to announce that my post about dinosaur brains and behaviour is featured in Open Lab 2009, the annual anthology of the best science writing on blogs. The book has just been published and is now available at Lulu.com, in hard copy or as a Kindle-compatible PDF.

This is the third Neurophilosophy post to be published in this series of books: my posts about the discovery of the neuron and the history of trepanation were included in the 2006 and 2007 editions, respectively.

This blog has also been selected as a finalist in the first annual Research Blogging Awards. I thought it might get into the category of Best Neuroscience Blog, but was very surprised to find it in the Best Research Blog category instead.

The expert panel of superstar science bloggers and writers who judged the awards assessed more than 400 nominees to select up to 10 finalists in each of the 20 categories. They consider their selections to be "the best of the best" in science blogging, so it's an honour to be included.

Voting for the awards opens on March 4th to all registered users of ResearchBlogging.org, who will be sent an email on that day inviting them to make their choices. If you're not a registered user, there's still time to register so that you can vote.

Many thanks to everyone involved in the awards, and congratulations to all the other finalists. Thanks also to all who put together Open Lab and last, but certainly not least, to you, my readers.

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It was a good article, the dinosaur brains one, but also memorable for a grammatical slip-up that made me smile at the time.

Lambeosaurs had hollow bony crests on their heads, the function of which was a subject of debate.

One cannot help but imagine the lambeosaurs gathered together debating the function of their own crests. Better: "... the function of which has been a subject of debate."

:-)

Congratulations!

I went back and read the dinosaur brain post, and was struck by the idea of deducing behavior from bumps in the skull. Please forgive the observation... I mean no disrespect to the scientists, and certainly none to you... but it's funny to see phrenology making a comeback.

(Yes, I know, that's not exactly how phrenology was supposed to work... but I have to wonder whether the first tentative conclusions of this new approach will, in the future, be demonstrated to be as unfounded as phrenological theory.)

By Chris Phoenix (not verified) on 02 Mar 2010 #permalink