Depression 

Yevgeniy Grigoryev explains in the Spoonful of Medicine Blog, after the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, the discussion about how mental health is handled and documented in the US has intensified:

1. Officials have not provided information about Lanza’s motivation and state of mind, and many are rightfully quick to point out that it is wrong to equate mental illness with the fatal sociopathic actions of a small group of individuals. The conversation about access to mental health care should, however, take into account new data showing an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teenagers in the US and Canada over the last two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe.

Continue to the post to hear more about depression in the US, as well as some harrowing statistics. You can also check out the Spoonful of Medicine’s timeline of events, a brief history of what made news this year.

Planet of the Apps

“How do you break through all that social media competition and get the public’s attention?” asks Gwen Pearson in this week’s Soapbox Science guest post. The post includes some top tips for scientists looking to promote their research socially:

The world of social media is just like the print and email worlds: billions of messages are competing for attention.   How do you break through all that competition, and get the attention of the public? How can you mobilize and engage people to create a community of supporters (and possibly donors)?

Before you start picking out your Facebook cover photo, stop and assess what you are doing already in terms of your communication efforts.

Feel free to share your own social media tips in Gwen’s post.

LinkedIn tips for scientists

How can scientists make their LinkedIn profiles look good?  Catherine de Lange provides some tops tips in the Nature Jobs blog:

1. To start with, make good use of your LinkedIn headline. This is attached to your name and photo in every communication that you send within LinkedIn. You can write up to 120 characters so instead of just listing your job title alone, consider crafting a statement that explains what you do and what sets you apart from the rest.

2. Use your profile summary to talk about who you are and what you do in more detail. This is the place to talk about research you are working on, subjects you are interested in, and ideas for potential future projects. If you are looking to collaborate, include a call to action for others to get in touch with you.

3. Make sure your profile is 100% complete. The more information, the more use it will be to others, and  complete profiles also show up higher in search results.

More tips can be found in Catherine’s post. 

 Research beagles released as pets

Seventy beagle puppies originally intended for pharmacology research were released to adoptive families in India on Saturday, explains Meredith Wadman in the News Blog:

The company, Bangalore-based Advinus, had been receiving beagle shipments from the Chinese arm of Marshall BioResources, a major research animal breeder based in North Rose, New York, since at least 2010. As Nature‘s news blog reported last month (see ‘Research dogs shipped to India under airline’s radar’), the dogs, which are a sought-after breed for toxicology research because of their docility, were flown to companies in India and Japan by Cathay Pacific, which refuses to transport research animals. Marshall had represented the dogs to the airline as being for “breeding” and “genetic research” purposes. “They won’t be hurt or killed as lab animals,” the Chinese arm of Marshall wrote to the airline.

Hear more about this story in Meredith’s post.

School Students’ Work May Help Better Climate Models

Khalil A. Cassimally, over at SciLogs, reveals that a bunch of school students, with help from researchers at the University of Arizona, have published a paper in the American Journal of Botany that may help better climate models:

Their work reveals that the shrinking of dried leaves, if unaccounted for, may make climate models less reliable.

These computer models are based on fragments of data of the Earth’s past that we find in fossils. One such fragment is area of fossilised leaves. Typically, species that spring larger leaves indicate warmer climates and a favourable environment. However, the area of fossilised leaves measured today is not an exact representation of the fresh leaves of the time. Leaves shrink as they dry and get fossilised, and they lose more water in warmer climates thereby shrinking more.

Continue to Khalil’s post to find out more.

Moon mapping mission ends with controlled crash

Ebb and Flow, the two probes that make up NASA’s GRAIL, the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, crashed one after the other into the Moon at 5:28 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on 17 December.  Eugenie Samuel Reich elaborates:

The probes, which flew in tandem exchanging radio signals in lunar orbits that were minutely but measurably perturbed by variations in the Moon’s density, were conceived of by Maria Zuber, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Their scientific findings so farinclude the result that the Moon’s crust is thinner than thought during the Apollo era, and that some impact craters thought to exist from lower-resolution maps are not there. The GRAIL researchers still needs to carry out the more detailed data analysis needed to map out the Moon’s more mysterious  core.

Further details in Eugenie’s post. 

The apocalypse and you

You may have heard that the world is ending today, so SciLogs blogger Pete Etchells has put together a list of handy tips and hints, just in case:

1. Plasters: Chances are, someone’s going to have a boo-boo on Friday. You’ll need some plasters to fix them up.

2. Zippo lighter: For holding up at the inevitable U2 benefit concert we’ll see in the aftermath.

3. Something to read: There’s not going to be much to do after the world ends. Buy them Ben Goldacre’s new book, Bad Pharma, so they can comfort themselves in the knowledge that all of those evil drug companies have been destroyed by the Mayans.

4. Bear Grylls: He’d be useful in an apocalypse, and I’m sure he’d fit in a stocking. Be sure to give him some breathing holes (not too many though, he might get out of one of them).

Let’s hope the Mayans were wrong and that we we are all here to enjoy the Christmas break!