All you can tweet (the blog version)
For the sake of posterity, Stuart Cantrill recaps Nature Chemistry’s April 2013 editorial about how they use Twitter:
You can follow Nature Chemistry on Twitter here. Continue reading
How To Grow A Garden On Mars
This week’s Soapbox Science post is by Louisa Preston, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Open University and TED Fellow. She explains why growing a garden on Mars may not be just science fiction:
Sketch of an ‘AstroGardening’ robot within a theoretical garden on Mars. Credit: Vanessa Harden.
A number of space agencies are focusing on space architecture and designing buildings for human habitation on the Moon and Mars. But what interests me, is the possibility and design of Space Agriculture or ‘AstroGardening’, particularly on Mars. If we want to live on another planet we will need, amongst many important things, food and water. Not shipped to us from Earth (it would cost $80,000 to transport 4 litres of water to the Moon, let alone Mars) but sustainably grown so that the first settlers and then future generations can live off the land. This means we need gardens, and lots of them!
What does the future hold for gardens on Mars? How can robots help? Find out more in Louisa’s post.
It’s time to map the brain
Nature Methods are devoting a special focus to neuroscience and Erika Pastrana shares some details in the Methagora Blog :
To understand the brain we need to know how and when neurons fire in the living animal while it performs naturalistic behaviors. We need to know the underlying wiring patterns and anatomical configuration of the circuits and we need to be able to develop testable models of how behaviors arise from the underlying function of the cells in the brain.
Obtaining this type of systems-level information about the brain has not been easy up to now. But thanks to technological development, this is rapidly changing.
You can read the special focus in full here.
Careers for scientists away from the bench
Many postdocs end up leaving the lab – so what other opportunities are out there? The Nature Jobs Blog discusses a recent workshop at the University of Helsinki centred on careers away from the bench:
Which way now?
ISTOCKPHOTO/THINKSTOCKOne theme that emerged during the conference was the idea that the traditional career path has changed – these days, your career trajectory will likely be dotted with dips and plateaus as you build skills or change directions. Changing jobs – even when related to your current field – can be daunting, but there are plenty of steps you can take to initiate that process whilst in your current role
Continue to the post which includes a list of possible job roles. Continue reading
Laser images hint at archaeological discoveries
Alexandra Witze reports in the News Blog, by bombarding a patch of the Honduran rainforest with laser pulses, archaeologists have discovered structures that could be a part of a lost city — or even two:
Images: UTL Scientific, LLC
In spring 2012, scientists from the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), based at the University of Houston, loaded a plane with a state-of-the-art lidar system and took it down to Honduras. Lidar bounces billions of laser pulses off of the forest and measures the time they take to return. Though most of the pulses reflect off vegetation, some small fraction reaches the ground. Researchers can thus build up a map of the surface by mathematically stripping away the canopy of tree leaves (shown at right).
Lidar has been used to calculate biomass in the Amazon and to hunt for extra structures at Stonehenge. In the dense forests of Central America, though, lidar “is like rewriting history,” says Christopher Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “We have just huge black holes on the map about which we know very little.”
Will lidar surveys become a common tool for archaeologists? Hear more in Alexandra’s post.
NASA astrophysicists seek ideas for the next 30 years
Alexandra Witze reports in the News Blog, one NASA advisory group is going for the long haul: between now and December it intends to draw up “a compelling, 30-year vision” for NASA’s astrophysics division:
{credit}NASA/ESA/SAO/CXC/JPL-CALTECH/STSCI{/credit}
This might seem like overkill, given that astronomers already perform “decadal surveys” every 10 years to prioritize future missions. In fact, the latest decadal survey came out just three years ago, with a midterm review due to start two years from now. The new ‘roadmap’ isn’t meant to replace the decadal survey process, says NASA’s Paul Hertz, head of the astrophysics division. “What the roadmap does is it looks out 30 years and provides a vision of what astrophysics might do,” he told a virtual town-hall meeting on 6 May.
In other words, more of a wish list than a prioritizing document. Chryssa Kouveliotou, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is heading up the road map under the auspices of a NASA advisory council subcommittee. In late February, her team put out a call for astronomers to submit one-page abstracts of what they considered the biggest science and technology goals and challenges for NASA astrophysics in the next three decades. Oh, and the deadline was just one month later.
What Can Be Done About Glass Ceilings in Science?
This week’s Soapbox Science guest post is by freelancer Ben Thomas, he looks at biases in scientific fields and how they can develop against men or women:
According to many experts, the unifying principles that inform these biases aren’t always intentional, and they emerge when differing professional expectations and corporate cultures meet.
“A lot of bias-influenced decisions aren’t malicious decisions or even discriminatory decisions,” says Betty Shanahan, executive director and CEO of the Society of Women Engineers. “But the net result is the same: they prevent some talented people from getting ahead.”
So how can differences, for example, in communication styles, bubble up into concrete distinctions among career paths and promotion levels?, A 2010 study funded by the National Science Foundation learned that recommendation letters written by women tended to focus on adjectives like “affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, nurturing, tactful and agreeable,” whereas recommendation letters composed by men leaned towards behavior-oriented descriptions and adjectives like “confident, aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, daring, outspoken and intellectual.”
Do you agree with Ben? Share your experiences in the comment thread. Continue reading
Thursday was #SoNYC’s 2nd birthday and we celebrated in style with a social media-themed event!
Building up to these conversations, we have been sharing case studies of scientists and communicators using social media for science outreach projects. The event was an extension of these conversations and you can recap by reading our Storify summary and by watching the video archive. You can also read all of the case studies here and stay tuned online using the #reachingoutsci hashtag as we intend to publish more this week. Continue reading
For the next week, content on the SpotOn website will be focused on a series of case studies about using social media for science outreach. For details of what to expect from the series, check out our overview. The full list of these #reachingoutsci posts, as they’re published, can be found here.
Also, don’t forget to tune into Thursday’s SpotOn NYC event. We’ll be celebrating SpotOnNYC’s second birthday with similar discussions about how to effectively use social media. As always, we’ll be live-streaming if you can’t join us in person. Continue reading
Bioengineered kidney makes urine after transplantation
Here’s research that could take the piss out of disease — and it’s no joke — explains Kevin Jiang in the Spoonful of Medicine Blog:
If the work can be replicated in humans, patients suffering from end-stage kidney disease could one day have “an organ that’s grown on demand—a tailored organ that can be transplanted and replaces the failing organ,” says study author Harald Ott, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
