SpotOn London 2013 – get your suggestions in! #solo13

Don’t forget that this year’s SpotOn London conference will take place on Friday 8th and Saturday 9th November. The theme is Impact – so if you have a suggestion that fits into this, please add it to the public google document – you’ve got until July 31st!

For more information on the conference and how you can get involved, see our blog post here  and if you’re not already on our mailing list, send us an email and we’ll add you!

Nature and Scientific American special: Learning in the Digital Age

Nature has joined forces with Scientific American to take a look at how technology is transforming education in a ‘Digital Learning’ special published this week:

From massive open online courses (MOOCs) to adaptive digital tools providing tailored learning experiences – what does this revolution mean for learning, teaching and research?

“Regardless of any apprehension about online learning, there is now an opportunity to transcend the limits of the ‘sage on the stage’,”

writes Michael M. Crow in a Comment piece in Nature. 

Read some background info on the special here and you can also access this in the NatureJournals app for iPad. If you want to talk about the ‘Digital Learning’ special online, please use the #digitallearning hashtag. 

nature.com blogs – a collection of blogs from editors and other staff at NPG

How can you identify “predatory publishers”? In this week’s Soapbox Science post Ian Woolley investigates:

The analysis of my inbox had been prompted by an email from my boss containing a line and a link to a website: Beall’s list of predatory publishers 2013. The email felt a little like a warning since the site cautioned: “we recommend researchers, scientists and academics avoid doing business with these journals”; and if you do, “tenure and promotion committees should give extra scrutiny to articles published in these journals, for many of them include instances of author misconduct.” 

Indigenus blogger Subhra Priyadarshini shares her views on the science blogging scene in India:

Why blog?

The evidence is clear: science sections in Indian newspapers (and globally) are shrinking. Television wakes up to science only during a nuclear disaster, a satellite lift-off or a Higgs boson. There are very few widely read science magazines simply because they do not make great commerce. Science coverage in mainstream Indian media, like many other issues of merit, has traditionally been minimal, primarily because of advertorial pressures and the space crunch. The obvious SOS route: go on-line. Report, comment, give opinion, analyse or put all that together and just blog. The number of journalists using a blog to replace or supplement their print avatars has grown phenomenally. They might chose to be objective, sticking to the traditional mandate of journalism, or to be opinionated trying to justify a point of view.

Check out this week’s best of NPG blogs for a summary of the latest content including: the Ebola virus, the costs of human bones, plus, can you help us identify a spider?

Scitable – Nature Education’s network of science blogs

Six high school bloggers joined Scitable last week. The three new blogs will cover topics as diverse as plant chemistry, viruses and the “what, why and where” of science. A fourth blog will be launched very soon too!

 

SciLogs.com – a blogging network

In Epilogue, Tania Browne blogs about epidemiology. In her own words, she blogs about “health in populations of people, how we study it and how we can affect it.” Lately, Tania has been looking at global health and especially the divide in healthcare and disease incidence between the richer and poorer countries. The shamefulness of this divide cannot be overstated.

Weekly morsels of the very best science articles curated by Malcolm Campbell right HERE.

Eppendorf Award

This year’s Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigatorswas awarded to Dr Ben Lehner for his discoveries concerning the fundamental question why mutations in the genome result in various phenotypes.

Listen to the podcast below to learn more about Ben’s work. You can also find out more here.

 

 

 

 

Nature PastCast

The Nature PastCast is a new podcast series telling the stories behind some of the biggest papers in Nature’s archive. The latest episode is all about scientific men in war-time:

During the Second World War, scientists worked on secret projects such as the development of radars.  Their efforts were hinted at in the pages of Nature but the details, of course, couldn’t be published.  In this episode, historian Jon Agar explains how war work gave physicists a new outlook and led to new branches of science. We also hear from John Westcott, now in his 90s, whose wartime job was to design radars.