Blogs
“I believe that the academic paper is now obsolescent as the fundamental sharable description of a piece of research.” So asserts David De Roure in a post about the future of research communication. And he’s not talking idly with no solutions. The post goes on to lay out 12 properties we’d expect from ‘research objects’, the as-yet undefined successor to the academic paper. Has he missed any?
After describing the biochemistry of a turkey, Barbara Ferreira went on to give thanks to genetics for providing her roast:
According to a 2008 Wired article, “Turkeys more than doubled in size” from 1929 to 2007. While the average bird used to weigh about 13 pounds (close to 6 kg) in 1929, today’s average turkey weighs close to 30 pounds, over 13 kg. In fact, some factory-farmed turkeys have become so large that they can barely walk let alone reproduce. However, their genetic information can still be passed on because of artificial insemination. It is using this technique that breeders make sure that some species of commercial turkeys are able to reproduce and that the poults carry the “size gene” inside them.
Elsewhere, Nature Protocols unveil their new Protocols Exchange for sharing experimental recipes, Bob O’Hara unpicks the Red Queen Hypothesis, and Fourth Paradigm blog has an interview with Jeff Dozier, professor in the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In other news…
This week, Lou Woodley attended and presented at the Futurebook conference, a one-day meeting about digital publishing and its implications for print. Her slides from the meeting, concerning Nature Network and scientific social networks, will appear online soon. In the meantime, those interested in the topic are referred to hashtag #fb10.
Finally, we’ll be deploying some more fixes and improvement to Nature Network in the coming week, and another round of blogs improvements will be live before Christmas. Stay tuned for more info.
And finally…
Which Nature Network blog has the best banner? We rounded them all up in one post for your delectation – which one’s your favourite?