Nature News is on Pinterest
The Nature News & Comment team are now on Pinterest! Joining the main Nature Publishing Group Pinterest account, and the Scientific American account,the team have created ten boards showcasing some of the cover art, photos and infographs from their latest news stories. If you are a Pinterest user, do follow along and get re-pinning!
nature.com blogs – a collection of blogs from editors and other staff at NPG
Growing a garden on Mars may not be just science fiction explains Louisa Preston, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Open University, in this week’s Soapbox Science guest post:
Gardening on Mars would provide a long-term food source for future human colonies and could provide over half their required calorie intake through the growth of tomatoes, potatoes and other fruit and vegetables. Plants such as asparagus, potatoes and marigolds have already been shown to grow in Mars-like soils, plus seeds of radish, alfalfa, and mung bean can sprout in the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars. Gardens also help to recycle nutrients, provide drinking water, and use the carbon from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce oxygen through photosynthesis.
This week’s best of NPG blogs is jam-packed and includes: science prizes, gene therapy, suborbital flights, plus a funny comic. You can also find a summary of the latest science news from the Middle East here – this week it’s all about separation, getting salt out of salt water, and removing carbon dioxide from other gases.
Meet the new Nature Jobs careers columnists
Finally, after being inundated with hundreds of entries, Nature Jobs have managed to whittle down their list of applicants for their careers columnist competition:
They reference Beyonce, are frank about their personal experiences, and are sure to make you laugh as well as think in new ways about working in science.
Find out who the winners are in their latest blog post and in the meantime, make sure you follow Nature Jobs on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ for all their updates.
Scitable – Nature Education’s network of science blogs
Is taking DNA from individuals arrested for misdemeanor offenses going “too far”? This is ethical dilemma Scitable forum Genetics Generation focused on last week. On one side, the DNA collected may help to solve past “cold” cases and potentially future cases but on the other hand, one’s DNA contains an awful lot of information too.
The UN released a report a month ago advocating for the use of insects as food for humans and animals. As blogger Khalil A. Cassimally says: “Eating insects is considered as disgusting or even primitive in Western societies but elsewhere, 2 billion people consume insects on a regularly basis. Now, according to a report released by the UN last month, the benefits of using insects as food is so great that it is high time we convert the other 5 billion people into insect-eaters.”
Xosé Castro (from flickr)
SciLogs.com – an NPG network of science bloggers
Blogger Kausik Datta dives into a notorious paper that received lots of attention from the press. The paper tests whether acupuncture has a soothing effect on people suffering from allergic rhinitis (crudely, “running-nose allergy”). The paper’s results are somewhat surprisingly but Datta’s analysis is damning.
The Frontier Scientists blog about Arctic science with a focus on the devastating effects of climate change on the fragile Arctic ecosystem. In last week’s post, Frontier Scientists discussed something that’s potentially worse than carbon dioxide for climate: black carbon.
As always, Malcolm Campbell has the past week’s science news curated in his weekly roundup. And all of SciLogs.com’s blog posts are here.
As interest in Earth’s changing climate heats up, a tiny dark particle is stepping into the limelight: black carbon. Commonly known as soot, black carbon enters the air when fossil fuels and biofuels, such as coal, wood, and diesel are burned. Black carbon, a short-lived particle, is in perpetual motion across the globe. / Courtesy NASA, the Image of the Day Gallery