Every Friday we publish a round-up of the highlights from Nature Network, Scitable and the nature.com staff blogs. We’ve also been flagging up interesting Communities news and events for our online readers. As there’s an increasing number of these events, we’re now creating a separate round-up. We hope to meet you online or offline soon!
Science Online 2012
This week registration for the anticipated Science Online 2012 kicked off, with the first batch of tickets being snapped up in just 2 minutes 42 seconds! Held in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, this will be the sixth annual international meeting on Science and the Web. As in all the previous years, the meeting will be held in an ‘unconference’ style – the program is built beforehand with the help of participants on the planning wiki, and the sessions are designed to foster conversations and discussions among everyone in the room rather than a traditional one-before-many lecture approach. We will be attending the conference and plan to report from some of the sessions, so do let us know if you plan to be there. If you haven’t already got your ticket, do make a note of the next batch of registrations which will be taking place:
Tues, Nov 8th at 00:01 a.m. EST
Wed, Nov 9th at 6 p.m. EST
You can also check out this Twitter list of the attendees so far and make sure you keep an eye on the official conference hash-tag #scio12.
Science Online NYC
We’ve arranged a Science Online NYC for next Thursday 10th November! Please join us in person at Rockefeller University from 7pm EST or online via our Livestream channel to discuss peer review.
Peer review, although not perfect, helps provide validity for new scientific findings. But lately, the headlines have been filled with scientific work that hasn’t made it through peer review: the Berkeley Earth project’s confirmation that the Earth has been warming, and the detection of neutrinos that might be traveling just a touch faster than light. The panel will discuss how we can judge the quality of something that hasn’t been through peer review, how different fields handle results that haven’t made it to journals yet, and the ethics of passing that information on to the public. The panel:
John Matson covers astronomy for Scientific American.
Maia Szalavitz is a journalist who focuses on neuroscience and is currently working on Time.com’s Healthland.
John Timmer is the science editor for Ars Technica, and has trained his managing editor to recognize when a news story contains the word “arXiv”.bq.
The event is free to attend and is followed by a chance to meet the panellists and other attendees afterwards. If you’d like to follow the vocal online discussion (we average around 600 tweets per SoNYC event), keep an eye on the #sonyc hashtag or check back here for our write-up and Storify of the online conversations.
#Scitweetups
Science Tweetups are a great way to meet local scientists and science communicators for an evening of chatting in the pub. Started in London with the #ukscitweetup, there are now regular tweetups in NYC (#NYCscitweetup), Cambridge, UK (#camscitweetup) and Washington DC (#DCscitweetup).
The next #DCscitweetup is on November 11th and will involve attending a National Geographic event.
The next #camscitweetup will take place on Thursday 24th November in the Kingston Arms pub.
The next #NYCscitweetup will take place on Thursday 1st December at the Peculier Pub.
To find out who else is attending, watch the relevant hashtags on Twitter.
Free Sciam Archive!
We all love a freebie and to celebrate the completion of the Scientific American archive on nature.com, the 1845-1909 archive collection will be free to all to access from 1-30 November. Published since 1845, Scientific American is the longest continually published magazine in the U.S, so whether you want to have a glance at the original reports of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone, or Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb, you’ll find it there! Learn more in the press release.
For Facebook lovers out there, Nature News and Comment now has a brand new Facebook page. This is where you will find the latest science and technology news from Nature, so make sure you click the “like” button!
For those interested in Nature’s other social media presences, we also have a Twitter list cataloguing all of our NPG Twitter accounts.