Tag Archives: #NYCscitweetup

Communities Happenings – 12th March

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SoNYC

SoNYC is the monthly discussion series that the nature.com Communities team organises in collaboration with Ars Technica and Rockefeller University. The event is also live-streamed and archived and we create a round-up post including a Storify storyboard of all the online conversations around the event. March 20th’s event is a re-scheduling of last October’s event on, Setting the research record straight and features Retraction Watch blogger, Ivan Oransky, John Krueger of the Office of Research Integrity and Liz Williams, Executive Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology:

The internet has enabled the faster and more thorough dissemination of published science, meaning that more eyes than ever are available to check the accuracy, veracity and integrity of the research record. With our enhanced ability to spot plagiarism and image manipulation electronically, it appears that the frequency with which we’ve flagged potentially fraudulent or plagiarized papers has gone up. This panel will look at the trends in retractions and how they relate to real or perceived increases in research misconduct. We hope to discuss what steps publications are taking to deal with the sloppy or fraudulent research practices that sometimes result in retractions, and also what research institutions are doing to investigate and deter such practices. Is the system broken, and what can researchers do to help fix it if it is?

As we did for February’s event, we have been posting related content on Of Schemes and Memes and first up we heard from Richard Van Noorden, Assistant News Editor at Nature, giving us an overview of what retractions can tell us about setting the research record straight. In his post he highlights some recent high profile cases of retraction, explaining why retraction rates appear to be increasing:

For suddenly, in the last ten years, retractions have shot up, rising ten- fold while the scientific literature expanded only 44%.  A blog, Retraction Watch, has monitored them over the past 18 months. Recent examples include prominent psychologist Diederik Stapel’s fraud  (particularly shocking because Stapel had such a stellar reputation); the dispute over whether or not chronic fatigue syndrome is linked to a virus ; and the scandal in which cancer geneticist Anil Potti’s flawed research led to patients being enrolled in clinical trials based on faulty data. Those are the ones that made headlines – but as Retraction Watch and Neil Saunders’ live feed of retraction notices on PubMed show, rarely a day goes by where a paper is not being withdrawn. The new norm nowadays is to expect hundreds of retractions, and perhaps that number will continue to rise.

Do stay tuned for more posts and please get in touch if you’d like to contribute anything.

SciBarCamb tickets

April sees the return of SciBarCamb – an unconference for scientists and technologists, taking place on the evening of Friday 20th April and all day on Saturday 21st. The earlybird tickets have now sold out, but there’s another chance to reserve your place from 10am on February 29th.  If you’d like to find out more about the event, read what co-organiser, Eva Amsen has to say about it.

NPG to publish new open access journal CPT

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT) are pleased to announce a new, open access journal. CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology (CPT:PSP) will launch in fall 2012 and will be hosted here. The journal will be a companion title to Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (CPT) and will be accepting submissions in summer 2012:

CPT:PSP will be a cross-disciplinary journal devoted to publishing original research in advances in quantitative methods as applied in pharmacology, physiology and therapeutics in humans. The common focus will be on quantitative methods that improve an understanding of pharmacology and therapeutics in humans. The editorial team will be led by newly-appointed Editor-in-Chief Pieter H. van der Graaf, PhD, PharmD. The team aims to provide a unique international forum for scientists in the pharmacometrics and systems pharmacology space.

All content will be open access and will be freely available to researchers worldwide through the nature.com platform. You can find out more in the official press release found here.

Tweetups and Facebook

Science tweetups offer opportunities to mix and mingle in person with sciencey friends you may have met online and are also a chance to learn something new. For those interested the next #NYCscitweetup will be held on Thursday 29th March in the Peculier Pub.  Join in from 6:30pm – all welcome! You can also find more NYC events in our NYC Science Communication events calendar that lists this event and others like it.

For those of you interested in science events across the world, you can find a list of our science events calendars here and a Facebook list of science events here. Feel free to let us know what is missing.

To make life easier, we have also created a list of NPG Facebook pages, so make sure you subscribe!

UK Conference of Science Journalists and Science communication events

The UK conference of science journalists will take place this year on June 25th. Their website is now live and earlybird registration is open until the end of March. The keynote will be by Jay Rosen and you can follow the online discussions on the #ukcsj hashtag.

Now onto another science communication focused event, “Scientists and journalists need different things from science. Discuss”. Held at the Royal Institution in London on Tuesday 13th March 7pm , the event will be guest curated by The Guardian’s Alok Jha, with Alice Bell, Chris Chambers and Nature’s Ananyo Bhattacharya as panel members. The session will look at the gulf between what journalists do and what scientists think they should do.

To warm up for Tuesday’s event, you can read Ananyo’s guest blog posts in The Guardian’s Notes and Theories blog: Science journalists should be asking questions and deflating exaggeration and Nine ways scientists demonstrate they don’t understand journalism. If you wish to attend you can find tickets here and do check out the official hash tag #Riscimedia for the online talk.

Communities Happenings – 5th March

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Communities Happenings is a weekly post with news of interest to NPG’s online communities. The aim is to provide this info in one handy summary. Listings include tweetups and conferences which we’re attending and/or organising as well as new online tools, products or cool videos. We also occasionally flag up NPG special offers and competitions plus updates about NPG social media activities such as new accounts you might want to follow. Do let us know what you find most useful!

#LensesonBiology

Last week Nature included an Outlook supplement focusing on Lenses on Biology, to coincide with the launch of Nature’s Education’s Principles of Biology textbook. Featuring overviews of 5 different subject areas by 5 top scientists, we complemented the special on Of Schemes and Memes with 5 blog posts by 5 young scientists at different stages of their careers.

First up was Vince Macri discussing productive failure and cancer research:

Part of my focus this term (Spring 2012) is on the molecular biology of cancer, a field which thrives on collaboration between various disciplines.  Novel drug-delivery systems, medical devices and techniques increasingly allow us to engage with and manipulate the various environments of malignant tumors. For example,  insight into molecular markers expressed frequently or exclusively by cancer cells allows for targeting of nanoparticles and drug conjugates to tumors and tumor vasculature.  Such targeted therapies have the potential to increase the effectiveness and reduce the side effects of drugs to combat cancer.

Researchers Use Gold Nanoparticles as Drug Carrier in New Cancer Treatment

 Next up was PhD student Christie Wilcox revealing her route to grad school:

 Christie Wilcox with a small gecko on her nose

 I got into science for a lot of reasons. I have always loved animals of all shapes and sizes. My childhood desire to gaze upon gecko tongues was just the beginning of a life-long obsession that includes squealing each and every time I hold a baby anything, an inexplicable urge to swim towards dangerous animals instead of away, and compulsively touching the bells of jellyfish. My passion for wildlife is only trumped by my fascination with puzzles. I am excited by the adventure of science, by the idea of stepping out into the universe and discovering something no one else has ever seen or solving a mystery no one else has. 

Post-doc, Holly Bik, taking a slightly more alternative approach to explaining how she enjoys looking for the zen in genomes:

I realised that success requires you to define your own niche. My niche, I’m finding, lies at the intersection of tradition and innovation, using cutting-edge genomics and computational biology to answer longstanding questions about deep-sea ecosystems. The deep-sea is a vast, complicated ecosystem, we know little about the “big picture” and next to nothing about the cellular machinery which breathes life into a specialized and sometimes grotesque fauna.

Unidentified crustacean species inhabiting the Mid-Atlantic ridge surrounding the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture zone in the North Atlantic

Undergrad, Katy Chalmers looks at how combining science and art has helped her to see details she might have otherwise missed:

The field of synthetic biology, which combines science and engineering to come up with new biological systems not found in nature, has many parallels with the relationship that I discovered between science and art. By looking at living systems in new and different ways, synthetic biologists find new ways of seeing the world. Using art to communicate science can do the same. In order to create a cohesive image, the subject material must be looked at from different perspectives. Often these different perspectives can lead to increased knowledge of the subject material, both on the part of the artist and the viewer.

Ornithoptera alexandrae butterfly. 

Finally, high-school student and Scitable blogger, Naseem Syed considers a how her experiences out of the classroom have enhanced her interest within it:

As I advance into my freshman year, I have begun to answer more of my own curiosities: Why do some male animals such as the Blue Footed Booby prance around in a seemingly silly dance? Having studied animal interactions I know their dance is part of a ritualistic mating courtship. Why don’t we look 100% like our parents? The field of genetics helps us understand that DNA is like a shuffled card deck with some probabilities dictated by the genes of our parents. Knowing more about biology helps with everyday life; having studied plant life I now know that the closet isn’t a good place to leave my potted plants and by learning more about climate change, I can understand news stories about global warming and what the consequences mean for our planet.

To continue with the Lenses On Biology discussion, follow the #lensesonbiology hashtag on Twitter, read Nature Job’s summary, or check out Scitable’s Khalil A. Cassimally‘s post, Scientists And Science Students Tell Us Why Science Matters.

UK Conference of Science Journalists

The UK conference of science journalists will take place this year on June 25th. Their website is now live and earlybird registration is open until the end of March. The keynote will be by Jay Rosen and you can follow the online discussions on the #ukcsj hashtag. Nature.com’s Lou Woodley will be helping to coordinate a session focusing on online tools for science journalists, so stay tuned for further information.

Shorty awards – final round

The Nature News team‘s Twitter account has made it to the final round of the Shorty Industry Awards in the category, ‘Best Use of Social Media for News’ for their coverage of Fukushima. This means they are now in competition with CNN, the BBC Breaking News and NBC News/MSNBC Twitter accounts.  They are also up for the science shorty too – so thanks if you have voted for them!

Good luck, News team!

SoNYC

SoNYC is the monthly discussion series that the nature.com Communities team organises in collaboration with Ars Technica and RockefellerUniversity. The event is also live-streamed and archived and we create a round-up post including a Storify storyboard of all the online conversations around the event. February’s event took place on Thursday 16th in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History for Social Media Week and discussed, Beyond a trend: enhancing science communication with social media. The panel included author Carl Zimmer, BBC journalist, Matt Danzico and was moderated by Jennifer Kingson of the New York Times Science section. Write-up, including Storify of the tweets here.

March 20th’s event is a re-scheduling of last October’s event on, Setting the research record straight and features Retraction Watch blogger, Ivan Oransky, John Krueger of the Office of Research Integrity and Liz Williams, Executive Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology.  As we did for February’s event, we will be posting related content on Of Schemes and Memes so stay tuned and please get in touch if you’d like to contribute anything.

Twitter, Facebook and Google +

This week has seen the revival of another NPG account on Twitter: @NatureEDU 

You can also find a full Twitter list of NPG journals and products here.

Nature Reviews and Scientific American Mind  now have their own Facebook pages, so make sure you “like” them.

Finally, there are now 8 NPG Google+ pages and they can all be found in this circle.

SciBarCamb tickets

April sees the return of SciBarCamb – an unconference for scientists and technologists, taking place on the evening of Friday 20th April and all day on Saturday 21st. The earlybird tickets have now sold out, but there’s another chance to reserve your place from 10am on February 29th.  If you’d like to find out more about the event, read what co-organiser, Eva Amsen has to say about it.

Events elsewhere

Our scientific events calendars have been freshly updated to include the latest scientific events. Make sure you check them out. Please do get in touch if we are missing any events or if you would like to contribute to this calendar or any of the other calendars listed below.

London Science Events

Cambridge Science Events

DC Science Events

NYC Sci Comm events

Boston Science Events

San Francisco Science Events

Paris Science Events

 

Communities Happenings – 28th November

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Scientific events in Boston

Boston blogger, Tinker Ready, has been alerting those in the area to a jam-packed week of scientific events and you can keep updated on the latest events by checking out her calendar. This week, she will be focusing her blogging efforts on viruses and she’ll be heading over to the AIDS @ 30 event. Do let us know if you plan to attend any of these events, or if there is anything missing from the calendar.

Don’t forget that we’ve also created Google Calendars for some of the other major science cities: Paris, London and Cambridge in the UK and DC, NYC and San Francisco in the US. Below you can find links to all of the Google Calendars we have put together:

Please do let us know if you can see any important omissions, or if you would like to contribute to any of the calendars.

SONYC!

Join us on Thursday December 8th, in person at Rockefeller University from 7pm EST, or online via our Livestream channel for the seventh SONYC! The topic for discussion will be, Matching medium and messengers to meet the masses.

Reaching an audience that’s already interested in science is relatively straightforward; however, reaching a broader audience can be challenging. Attracting and maintaining an audience outside the core of science enthusiasts requires a carefully crafted match of the medium and messenger. This SONYC will consider when and how scientists and science communicators should seek to highlight science issues to the general public? Should we be ready to respond and correct public misunderstandings or attempt to influence science policy? What material can be handled through social media and what requires a more involved form of engagement, such as a science festival?

The event is free to attend with an opportunity to meet the panellists and other attendees afterwards. If you’d like to follow the vocal online discussion, keep an eye on the #sonyc hashtag or check back here for our write-up and Storify of the online conversations. Do continue to check the official Twitter account for more information.

FameLab

FameLab, set up in 2005 by Cheltenham Science Festival, is the international competition for science communicators and this week the London heats have begun! Kings College London is the venue for the heats, with a winner and a wildcard from each heat making the final next Wednesday. Over the next few days, Nature Network London will feature interviews with the winners and wildcards. First up is wildcard and Imperial PhD student, Edward Yoxall:

How did you become interested in communication and have you ever done anything like this before?

I’ve never done anything like FameLab, but I guess I’ve always enjoyed being on stage. Gives you such a rush! I’ve been working for the BBC on the ‘Bang Goes the Theory’ roadshow as a science demonstrator, so that’s been pretty good practice for speaking in front of crowds. It’s also been good at making me pitch at the right level – finding the balance between complexity and simplicity is definitely one of the hardest parts of the job.

Do keep an eye on the London blog for the remaining interviews.

Nature Outlook: Allergies

The increased prevalence of allergies and asthma, especially in the developed world, has raised the stakes in the quest for prevention and cure. In light of this, the latest Nature Outlook supplement is all about allergies. Nature Network blogger Paige Brown features in the supplement with her article, Atopy: Marching with allergies, where she details her lifelong struggles with allergic disorders and hyper-reactivity:

My mother, herself allergy-prone, remembers my inflamed and itchy skin lesions in infancy. These are classic symptoms of atopic eczema, better known in the United States as atopic dermatitis. Then, in my toddler years, as my father recounts, I started to show “this peculiar reaction” around animals, scratching at my throat as my eyes went red, watery and swollen. These typical symptoms of allergic rhinitis, or hay fever, owe their origins to human immune-system responses to specific protein allergens, for example those found in animal dander:

You can read the whole, free supplement here.

cover.jpg

#Scitweetups

Science Tweetups are a great way to meet local scientists and science communicators for an evening of chitchat in the pub. There are now regular tweetups in NYC ( #NYCscitweetup, ) Cambridge, UK ( #camscitweetup ) and Washington DC (#DCscitweetup. )

The sixth #NYCSciTweetup is on Thursday 1st December at the Peculier Pub. Join in from 6.30pm onwards.

On the other side of the Atlantic, there is also a pre-Xmas #ukscitweetup in London; here’s the doodle poll where you can vote for your preferred dates. To find out who else is attending, watch the #ukscitweetup hashtag on Twitter.

It is question time

This week NatureNews have been asking via their brand new Facebook page, “Who owns your lab notebook?” In response to a legal dispute about missing notebooks in Nevada, some have wondered whether most working scientists even know who technically owns their lab notebooks. So, for the working scientists out there, is it clear that the research notes you take generally belong to the institution you work for? You can respond to their FB poll here and make sure you “like” them to keep updated on the latest news.

For those interested in Nature’s other social media presences, we also have a Twitter list cataloguing all of our NPG Twitter accounts and we also have a Google + circle featuring all the NPG Google+ pages. This circle will be continuously updated as and when accounts are created.

Communities Happenings – 17th November

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Welcome to the blogosphere

new blog image.jpg

We would like to wish a warm welcome to a new blog which began on the Scitable blogging network this week. The Promethean Cell will track ongoing issues and research in the regenerative medicine fields and will occasionally be interspersed with anecdotes from a fledgling postdoc’s career. Ada Ao, a postdoctoral research fellow at Vanderbilt University, explains more about her new blog:

Now that I’ve declaimed from my soapbox, what exactly will I blog about? The possibilities are endless. Recent discoveries in the stem cell field are incredibly exciting. This blog will encompass issues like basic biology, opinions and views, and where we may go next in terms of applicable therapeutics. I’m really aiming to put together the “big picture”.

We urge you to check it out and do feel free to send Ada a tweet; she’s @adaaocom on Twitter, with any feedback or suggestions.

On Nature Network we would also like to welcome post-doc student Ivana Gadjanski whose new blog, My Metacognitive Oasis began this week. Her very first post discusses how she Zigs and Zags through her scientific career:

I still remember the feeling I had immediately after obtaining my PhD degree. It was a mixture of relief, accomplishment and somehow emptiness. And one question kept popping in to my mind. What now?

You can follow her story in her blog and please feel free to join in the discussion.

Neuroblogging

Neuroscience 2011 has been this year’s major event for neuroscientists from around the globe. Organised by the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), the event took place from November 12th – 16th, in Washington, DC. To tie in with this, some of the attendees have been sharing their observations from the event in an exclusive series of guest posts on NPG’s Neuroscience blog, Action Potential.

We’ve created two round-ups of the blogging coverage; part 1 here and part 2 In addition, Action Potential’s editor, Noah Gray, has created a Google + circle listing the guest bloggers and you can also follow the hashtag #NPGsfn11 on Twitter to share in the discussion. Do let is know if you have any feedback.

SONYC!

The details of December’s Science Online NYC (#SoNYC) event were announced this week. Please join us on Thursday December 8th, in person at Rockefeller University from 7pm EST, or online via our Livestream channel to discuss, Matching medium and messengers to meet the masses.

Reaching an audience that’s already interested in science is a relatively easy thing to do. Reaching a broader audience, however, can be a serious challenge. Attracting and maintaining an audience outside the core of science enthusiasts requires a carefully crafted match of the medium and messenger. When and how should scientists and science communicators seek to highlight science issues to the general public? Should we be ready to respond and correct public misunderstandings or attempt to influence science policy? What material can be handled through social media, and what requires a more involved form of engagement, such as a science festival?

This month’s panel has experience communicating with everyone from young kids to policymakers, and will discuss what they’ve learned about using different spokespeople and platforms to get their message out. The panel includes:

Darlene Cavalier: The woman behind the Science Cheerleaders

Jamie Vernon: A science policy analyst

Molly Webster: The lead producer for live programming at the World Science Festival.

Kevin Zelnio: The webmaster for the Deep Sea News and a freelance writer.

The event is free to attend with an opportunity 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. Do also keep an eye on the official Twitter account for more details.

Tweetups

Science Tweetups provide an excellent opportunity to meet local scientists and science communicators for an evening of chatting in the pub. For those interested in the next #camscitweet, this will be held next week on Thursday 24th November in the Kingston Arms pub. Join in from 6:30pm and anyone is welcome!

For those on the other side of the Atlantic, keep an eye on the #DCscitweetup and #NYCscitweetup hashtags for information on future events.

Twitter and Google+

This week has seen the launch of another NPG journal account on Twitter, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology who are tweeting as @NatRevMCB

You can also find a full Twitter list of NPG journals and products here.

Last week Google+ launched pages and several NPG journals and products have already created their own. See our circle featuring all the NPG Google+ pages. This circle will be continuously updated as and when accounts are created.

Science Calendars

Yesterday we alerted you to the latest scientific calendar in our series, Science Events in Paris. The calendar is moderated by MyScienceWork, an open access scientific research network.

There’s always an interesting science event taking place and to help with diary planning, we’ve created Google Calendars for some of the other major science cities: London and Cambridge in the UK and NYC, Boston and San Francisco in the US. Below you can find links to all of the Google Calendars we have put together:

Please do let us know if you can see any important omissions.