Science Online London 2011
On Wednesday afternoon, tickets for the eagerly awaited Science Online London 2011 conference went on sale. Science Online London (SoLo) is an event dedicated to exploring the ways in which the Web has transformed scientific research and communication. The programme is full of energising science-inspired activities and is a “must-go” for all those interested in how science is carried out and communicated online.
Everything you need to know about the conference, including how you can purchase tickets, can be found in our summary post. The first batch of early-bird tickets sold out on the afternoon they were released, so be sure to get yours quickly. To give you even more of a flavour of the events to be enjoyed, check out the coverage of last year’s conference on Flickr, keep posted on the latest news on the Science Online blog and follow the conference on Twitter @soloconf (official hashtag #solo11).You can also find a list of attendees here.
Transplant week
In order to mark transplant week, an annual event which raises awareness of organ donation in the UK, London blogger Joanna Scott has been interviewing Marlene Rose, who is a Professor of Transplant Immunology at Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust:
There are many complex ethical issues in solid organ transplantation, such as how to increase donation and how best to obtain consent from relatives of donors for research projects aimed at improving the outcome of transplantation. I hope people view donation as a gift of life, which can hopefully provide some compensation to the bereaved family.
You can find out more about Professor Marlene Rose’s role and how you can become an organ donor in the post.
Social networking and the economy
Are you addicted to social networking? Do you experience an adrenaline rush when you get a new notification or a message? With Google + the new social networking site opening this week, Muka has been considering his social networking compulsions in his latest post, Facebook addiction.
See? That icon just released a squirt of dopamine across my brain. Some time ago, I decided to limit the number of posts and comments I made, which led to a dramatic decline in notifications. Yet, I found myself logging in multiple times throughout the day and repeatedly scanned the New Feed. Any update was a “reward”. In fact, the anticipation of an update was reward enough.
Do you agree with Muka? Have you ever tried to give up social networking? Have your say in his comment thread.
This week’s guest blogger is author David Orrell, founder of Systems Forecasting and an Honorary Visiting Research Scholar at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford. In his guest post, Why We Need A New Economics, he reveals that:
Economyths is an attempt to spell out what such a revolution might look like, and document the exciting developments taking place in economics.
Find out more of his thoughts in his post. The UK Kindle edition of Economyths is also available for a limited time at the very reasonable price of 99p.
News of the World no longer
This week also saw the closure of the long-running News of the World newspaper. In his post Screwy Lee Turnpenny discuses its closure, revealing his own thoughts:
Whether or not it is ‘proper’ to draw conclusions about somebody when you enter their home and encounter their reading choices evidently displayed on their bookshelves, do we ever wonder what it says about us as a nation that, until yesterday, four out of ten Sunday newspapers sold in the UK were copies of the News of the World?
In other news this week, Barbara Ferreira’s revealed in her blog post that Sunday saw the birthday of Neptune:
Today, for the first time since it was discovered, Neptune is completing a full orbit around the Sun. This means it will be exactly one Neptunian year, or 164.79 Earth years, since the planet was first observed around midnight on the 23-24 September 1846.
She also discusses the bad news which broke this week; a subcommittee of the US Congress are putting the JWST (short for James Webb Space Telescope) on the chopping block. She explains that the telescope is the planned successor of the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST was designed to be able to detect objects some 100 times fainter than those seen by Hubble, and its scientific goals include observing objects from the very early universe, as well as studying star and planet formation.
The news blog have also been discussing this report in their latest post, Bid to infuse Webb telescope with cash fails. They reveal that:
Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, tried to insert an amendment today that would have partially restored funding for JWST. He asked that $200 million be transferred to JWST from NASA’s account for Cross Agency Support. The amendment failed by a voice vote, which means that ayes and nays by the committee members are not tallied.
Find our more in their post.
Student Mistakes!
In his latest post on the Labcoat Life blog, Scitable blogger, Khalil A. Cassimally lists 15 Mistakes that Young Researchers Make:
1. Failure to carefully examine the literature for similar research
2. Failure to critically assess the prior literature
3. Failure to specify the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the subjects
4. Failure to determine and report the error of measurement methods
5. Failure to specify exact statistical assumptions made in the analysis
6. Failure to perform sample size analysis before the study begins
7. Failure to implement adequate bias control measures
8. Failure to write and stick to a detailed time line
9. Failure to vigorously recruit and retain subjects
10. Failure to have a detailed, written and vetted protocol
11. Failure to examine for normality of data
12. Failure to report missing data, dropped subjects and use of an intention to treat analysis
13. Failure to perform and report power calculations
14. Failure to point out the weaknesses of own study
15. Failure to understand and use correct scientific language.
Are you a young researcher? Do you agree with Khalil and can you add any more mistakes to the list?
Animal Research
This week the Spoonful of Medicine Blog have revealed that despite concerns of activist attacks, animal research continues to rise:
A recent Nature poll revealed that nearly one in four biologists have been negatively affected by animal-rights activists. Yet that hasn’t led to a reduction in the number of animals used in biomedical research, at least in Britain.
Similar to recent years, mice, fish, rats and birds accounted for the majority (97%) of the procedures; only around 0.1% of the studies involved non-human primates. You can find our more information and have your own say in the post.
It is not just higher animals that scientists use as subjects; they can also learn from insects. In her latest post, Learning from Insect Swarms: Smart Cancer Targeting, Paige Brown has been discussing a research paper published in Nature Materials this week which takes lessons from insect swarms:
Insect swarms indeed often come up with solutions to a common task or problem that are “better than those produced through the most advanced mathematics” 2. When researchers like Geoffrey von Maltzahn at MIT take lessons from swarm behavior and other examples of cooperation in nature (Figure 1), the results are engineered systems that have the potential to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of various cancers.
Find out more in her post that is also mirrored on Scientific American’s Guest Blog.
The butterfly effect
Eva’s latest post, Make history, not vitamin C3 describes the effects of the VOC trade company, a Dutch company which was established to sail the oceans and bring back spices to the Netherlands from India. VOC began in 1602 – the very first multinational corporation and the first company to sell stocks. Eva reveals how its successes shaped entire fields of art and science, all because a few ships found a route to the East Indies in a time of economic need. However, she also details how the sailors of these ships battled with scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, and questions whether things would have turned out very differently if this mutation didn’t exist….
Our inability to synthesize vitamin C is the result of a mutation that occurred more than forty million years ago in our shared primate ancestor, affecting the gene that encodes the L-gulonolactone oxidase (GULO) enzyme. Normally, this enzyme catalyses a crucial step in the formation of vitamin C. But in humans and related primates the genetic mutation produces a broken enzyme.
Find out in her thought-provoking post how the course of history, particularly that of South Africa, has been changed by this one genetic mutation and humans’ need for vitamin C.
Finally – no to GMO?
Many countries ban all the GMO plants, no matter what kind of genes are inserted to the host. Viktor Poor, in his latest comic strip highlights how things would be very different today if ancient countries had had the same policy:
