Wellcome Image Award celebrates the small

Chicken embryos, a forest of micro-needles, and a rather gory brain picture — welcome to this year’s Wellcome Image Awards, quips Daniel Cressey in the News Blog.

Catherine Draycott, one of the award judges, says the 16 images that made the final cut and are now on display in London were chosen for their scientific and technical merit as much as for their aesthetic appeal. “They offer people a chance to get closer to science and research and see it in a different way, as a source of beauty as well as providing important information about ourselves and the world around us,” said Draycott, head of Wellcome Images, in a statement.

Daniel links out to the top five images the Nature News team preferred in his post, and he warns that the winning image may tick the ‘eww’ box!

Creationist textbook campaign

Brian Owens, explains in the News Blog that a group of 30 South Korean evolutionary scientists and paleontologists have released a statement condemning a campaign by the creationist group Society for Textbook Revise (STR) to remove some examples of evolution from high-school biology textbooks:

The group say the textbook publishers were wrong to remove examples of the evolution of the horse and the avian ancestor Archaeopteryx, and that instead the relevant sections should be updated to include the latest research. They also criticised the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology for failing to oversee textbook revisions. In response to a public outcry, the ministry has said it will set up an expert panel to oversee future revisions (see Expert panel to guide science-textbook revisions in South Korea).

Continue to the post to find out more.

Containment concerns 

Elie Dolgin, reports in The Spoonful of Medicine Blog that the US government continues to underestimate the potential of a dangerous pathogen escaping from a proposed BSL-4 containment biosecurity laboratory:

A panel convened by the country’s National Research Council (NRC) concluded that an assessment completed earlier this year by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) overestimated the danger posed by tornadoes and earthquakes but underestimated the possibility of a disease being released by human error at the $1.14 billion National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Manhattan, Kansas, which is slated to replace a half-century-old lab on Plum Island, New York. “The DHS has just not established the safety of this facility,” Tom Manney, a retired Kansas State University geneticist and a member of No NBAF in Kansas, a group against the proposed facility, told Nature Medicine. “It may well be safe, but their analysis and how they’ve cherry-picked their data, and their assumptions give a very distorted and inaccurate view of it.”

Find out more about this in Elie’s commentary.

Turing : The Irruption of Materialism into thought

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth, computer scientist Paul Cockshott looks at the role he played as the founder of computing science in this week’s Soapbox Science guest post:

What distinguished Turing from the other pioneer computer designers was his much greater philosophical contribution. Turing thought deeply about what computation is, what its limits are, and what it tells us about the nature of intelligence and thought itself.

Learn more about Turing, in Paul’s post.

Heart phone

Subhra Priyadarshini reveals in the Indigenus Blog, that India’s cardiovascular epidemic of sorts, can now benefit from a easy-to-use smartphone application that will tell them exactly how their heart is faring:

The application is called Health Tracker, and will calculate a comprehensive risk profile that can be uploaded to a secure electronic health record. High risk individuals will then be referred to see a doctor who follows a management plan for the patients long term care. According the George Institute, India, which will implement the project, it will build capacity in primary healthcare in rural India. Australia’s national health and medical body,The National Health and Medical Research Council, will spend Rs 15 crore on this project and a couple more. David Peiris, the principal investigator for the heart phone project, feels that it will be a practical intervention to address the growing cardiovascular epidemic in India. The pilot findings, he says, will be used to inform a large scale trial in rural India.

More information can be found in the post.

To be or not to be good science

Scitable’s blogger, Audrey Richard is talking about the colour red in her latest post:

 A friend of mine claimed to me that: “if you want to increase your chances to attract a man evoke many physiological and psychological and eventually seduce him, go for red. It’s a scientific fact. Clothes, lips, accessories: the whole package.” Like this:

Why he felt he had to give me such a piece of advice, I won’t tell. But red is indeed known to evoke many physiological and psychological effects in humans, including women being more desirable to men when they are associated with red clothes or objects. To indicate their sexual receptiveness and ovulation, females from several primate species show enlarged, red swellings that are preferred by males compared with less brightly coloured skins. Based on these observations, it has been proposed, under the name of the “sexually salient hypothesis”, that men might themselves have a biological predisposition to interpret the colour red as a signal sent by women to announce their own sexual proceptivity.

Is red really the colour of love? Is this type of research scientifically sound? Find out more in Audrey’s post.

From research to science teaching

Following last week’s announcement of the 2011 US Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, Naturejobs blogger, Rachel Bowden spoke to three of the awardees who chose teaching over traditional research roles, asking them what the benefits and drawbacks of this career path are:

Staying professional

Moving from research to teaching does not make you any less of a professional, emphasises William Wallace, a former molecular biologist who now teaches physiology and research methods in biology at Georgetown Day School in Washington DC. “You can be a leader in the field and you can be challenged intellectually,” he says. “I’ve had as much professional satisfaction teaching as I did being a research scientist.”

Joan Christen from Beatrice High School in Nebraska, who gained her PhD in entomology while working as a full-time high-school teacher, agrees that there are distinct parallels between the two fields. “[Teaching] can be a very rewarding and very frustrating experience, just like traditional research,” she says.

One of the most important things to consider about a career in teaching, says Wallace, is whether or not you genuinely enjoy working with children and young people. “If you don’t particularly like kids but you love science, you’re going to have a tougher time,” he says.

More of their comments can be found in Rachel’s account.

Society for Investigative Dermatology 

JID Jottings  blogger, Lowell Goldsmith reports on the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for Investigative Dermatology (SID) in his latest post. The meeting celebrated the 75th anniversary of the SID. Lowell details the exhibits he found most inspiring:

 Another inspirational exhibit was the reproduction of Stephen Rothman‘s notebook documenting his displacement from Hungary and his relocation to the University of Chicago, where he performed and recorded pharmacological studies on his own skin.

The oral and poster presentations, many by dermatology residents and fellows from around the world, inspired attendees with new data related to skin biology and skin diseases.

More reports from the conference can be found in his post.

Last minute posters 

Finally, Viktor Poór  highlights how conference posters are often made last minute in his latest cartoon: