The week on Nature Network: Friday 9 January
This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
Erika Cule picks up on a paper in Science addressing whether peer discussion could improve student performance on in-class questions, even when none of the students in the discussion group know the answer, via a technology similar to that used for "ask the audience" sections of the TV show 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'. Erika wonders whether students could learn more from each other by collaborative problem-solving, than they could from a conventional lecture.
In the Nature Nanotechnology - Asia Pacific and beyond forum, editor Ai Lin Chun describes the pleasures of meeting scientists and hearing their stories, which she is able to do as part of her job. One such scientist is Dan Peer, who was a postdoc at Harvard Medical School when he published a review article in Nature Nanotechnology, and who is now head of the Laboratory of Nanomedicine at the Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Tel Aviv University. Dan writes in the forum about his experiences of nanotechnology research in a country at war.
Nature Network bloggers have made a strong showing in Open Laboratory 2008, this year's anthology of science blog posts, writes Corie Lok, Nature Network's Editor. Six of the 50 selected posts are by Nature Network bloggers: the posts and links to them can be accessed here. The editors are currently compiling the posts into a book.
On reading Darwin's Origin of Species, Bob O'Hara came across this passage: "So again with the varieties of sheep: it has been asserted that certain mountain-varieties will starve out other mountain-varieties, so that they cannot be kept together. The same result has followed from keeping together different varieties of the medicinal leech." This prompts him to ask how medicinal leeches are kept when they are not used. Answers in the comments to his post, please.
Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Network's many blogs and forums
Science Online FriendFeed room.
