Housekeeping
clock | July 5, 2011Earlier this morning, I have moved my blog over to the Scientific American site - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/. Follow me there (as well as the rest of the people on the new Scientific American blog network
clock | July 26, 2010This blog can now be found at http://blog.coturnix.org and the feed is http://blog.coturnix.org/feed/. Please adjust your bookmarks/subscriptions if you are interested in following me off-network.
clock | July 19, 2010It is with great regret that I am writing this. Scienceblogs.com has been a big part of my life for four years now and it is hard to say good bye.
Everything that follows is my own personal thinking and may not apply to other people, including other bloggers on this platform. The new contact information is at the end of the post, but please come back up here and read the whole thing - why I feel like I must leave now.
Sb beginnings
Scienceblogs.com started back in January 2006. On that day, several of my favourite science bloggers moved to this new site, posting the URL on their farewell…
rskloot | July 8, 2010Please redirect your browsers to Culture Dish's new home, where we've just put up the inaugural welcome post. There you will find an RSS to subscribe to so you can follow Culture Dish wherever it goes next (which we very much hope you'll do).
sb admin | July 7, 2010As I said yesterday on Twitter, a big conflict of interest and transparency problem has arisen on ScienceBlogs. Like several other bloggers here, I'm now on a hiatus, however like like David Dobb's and Blake Stacy's, my hiatus from ScienceBlogs will be permanent. I've been contemplating a move from ScienceBlogs for a while for several reasons, but PepsiGate has sealed the deal for me. Several of my ScienceBlogs colleagues have summed up the situation well, including PZ Myers, GrrlScientist, and Brian over at Laelaps. For a full recap of the issue and other ScienceBloggers' responses, see…
rskloot | July 7, 2010As I said yesterday on Twitter, a big conflict of interest and transparency problem has arisen on ScienceBlogs. Like several other bloggers here, I'm now on a hiatus, however like like David Dobb's and Blake Stacy's, my hiatus from ScienceBlogs will be permanent. I've been contemplating a move from ScienceBlogs for a while for several reasons, but PepsiGate has sealed the deal for me. Several of my ScienceBlogs colleagues have summed up the situation well, including PZ Myers, GrrlScientist, and Brian over at Laelaps. For a full recap of the issue and other ScienceBloggers' responses, see…
clock | July 2, 2010I see - DrugMonkey, Janet, Pal and Jason are reviving the annual tradition of asking readers to say in the comments who they are. I did this in 2008 bit can't find if I did it in 2009. The original questions and instructions are:
1) Tell me about you. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? If so, what draws you here as opposed to meatier, more academic fare? And if not, what brought you here and why have you stayed? Let loose with those comments.
2) Tell someone else about this blog and in particular, try and choose someone who's not a scientist but who you think might be…
sb admin | July 2, 2010
I've been working for a while to develop a Frequently Asked Questions page to answers the most common reader questions about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Well, it's now online, and it addresses questions ranging from why HeLa cells are immortal to how the Lacks family is benefiting from the book. It also includes answers to commonly asked publishing questions, like, How do I break into science writing? You can read it online here. If you have burning questions not answered there, leave them in the comments section below -- I'll add to the FAQ as questions arise and time allows.
sb admin | July 1, 2010A press release landed in my inbox today with this headline, which raised my eyebrows (as it was obviously intended to do): "First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb." It starts with this quote from Alice Dreger, a Northwestern University bioethicist: "This is the first we know in the history of medicine that clinicians are actively trying to prevent homosexuality." The release was announcing the publication of a piece at the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum titled, "Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb? -- it was written by the same authors that…
clock | July 1, 2010Last week, my SciBling Jason Goldman interviewed me for his blog. The questions were not so much about blogging, journalism, Open Access and PLoS (except a little bit at the end) but more about science - how I got into it, what are my grad school experiences, what I think about doing research on animals, and such stuff. Jason posted the interview here, on his blog, on Friday, and he also let me repost it here on my blog as well, under the fold:
Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we're starting a new series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal…
clock | July 1, 2010I posted only 105 times in June. It is summer, and in summer traffic falls, weather is too nice to stay inside, and blogs tend to go on vacation or at least slow down. And I wrote about it in No, blogs are not dead, they are on summer vacation.
But this does not mean that this blog was on vacation. Along with a bunch of cool videos and announcements, I wrote several other posts, some garnering quite a lot of commentary, most in some way touching on media, blogging and science journalism.
See, for example, Why is some coverage of scientific news in the media very poor?
Or Am I A Science…
clock | June 1, 2010I posted only 127 times in May. Apart from many cool videos and various updates, I did blog about other things as well.
I went to the WWW2010 conference and wrote my thoughts about it.
Open Laboratory submissions are in full swing so I decided to post the old Prefaces and Introductions I wrote for the first three books.
Dennis Meredith came to town to talk about Explaining Research so I reported from the event. I also reported on the presentation about Serious Gaming at Sigma Xi.
Two of my friends and neighbors published books in May so I announced the sites and times for local readings - 'On…
sb admin | May 31, 2010Anyone interested in Henrietta Lacks and the grave marker finally placed on her long unmarked grave this weekend should click here immediately for a beautiful post by scientist David Kroll, who attended the unveiling ceremony. It's filled with beautiful photos of the day, and a tribute to all Henrietta's cells did for science. His photo below shows Henrietta's new headstone in much sharper detail than the one I posted yesterday with the text of the inscription. Visit his post for many more photos of the ceremony, the graveyard, and Henrietta's family.
sb admin | May 29, 2010Today is a very exciting day: Henrietta Lacks (aka HeLa) has been lying in an unmarked grave since her death in 1951. Today, thanks to Dr. Roland Pattillo at Morehouse School of Medicine, who donated a headstone after reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her grave is finally marked. Below, a snapshot of some members of the Lacks family beside the new marker for Henrietta, and the marker for her daughter, Elsie, which was also unveiled today. Dr. Roland Pattillo is pictured at the far left:
Her stone, in case you can't tell from the picture, is shaped like a book. The text was…
sb admin | May 13, 2010Things have been a bit quiet here as I finished up my crazy
four-month-long book tour, and there's much to catch up on. First, some big news just in: Oprah,
Alan Ball, and HBO are going to be making a movie version of my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This news has gotten quite a bit of
coverage on Twitter and elsewhere, with me fielding questions about the movie,
and various folks voting on who should play which character in the film (not
that I have any control over such things, but it's still fun to think about).
The combination of Oprah, Alan Ball, and HBO is nothing…
clock | May 1, 2010I posted 153 times in April.
First, importantly, I again committed scienceblogging in April, with the post Evolutionary Medicine: Does reindeer have a circadian stop-watch instead of a clock?.
April focus appears to be Twitter - hence two posts specifically about it: Twittering is a difficult art form - if you are doing it right and More on mindcasting vs. lifecasting.
Early in April, I introduced the Open Laboratory 2010 editor and made available the 'submit to Open Laboratory 2010' buttons.
A science journalist curmudgeoned herself, so I felt compelled to collect all the responses, in For…
clock | April 17, 2010As this blog is getting close to having 10,000 posts, and my Archives/Categories are getting unweildy (and pretty useless), I need to get some of the collections of useful posts together, mainly to make it easier for myself to find them. I did that by collecting my best Biology posts a couple of weeks ago. Today, I am collecting my best posts from the categories of Media, Science Reporting, Framing Science and Blogging. There are thousands of posts in these categories combined, most with excellent links or videos, but here are some of the posts that have substantial proportion of my own…
sb admin | April 4, 2010I mentioned a while ago that I'll be posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog.
I thought I'd start the FAQs with one of the most commonly asked questions: How did you learn about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, and why did they grab you the way they did? Here is the answer, which I also posted about over on Powells.com's book blog this last week as part of a little guest blogging stint:
I first learned about Henrietta Lacks in the late 80s, when I was 16 and sitting in a basic biology class at Portland Community College
(…
clock | April 4, 2010This blog was reviewed by Dr Justin Marley at The Amazing World of Psychiatry: A Psychiatry Blog. Check it out.