Blogs
Nature Network is delighted to welcome our newest blogger MuKa, whose blog US and my Mind got off to a terrific start this week. MuKa’s blog is focused on his ambition to find a psychology postdoc position in the States. His first post What do you do, considers the ineptness associated with trying to explain your scientific career goals at a party.
I would struggle to come up with a succinct and interesting reply when asked the latter question. What do I do? I’m doing a psychology PhD where I’m looking at how people make decisions in response to a vibrotactile discrimination task. At this point the stranger turns to a pot plant:
As we get into the full swing of 2011, Barbara Ferreira asks What’s up with birds?
Her post reveals some shocking reports on the recent mass animal die-offs. Also on the subject of animal populations, Anne-Marie Hodge’s latest post talks of animal populations in Wild Dogs & the Allee Effect.
Elsewhere…
Karen Vancampenhout has been sparking a great debate in her latest blog post Stereotyped. She considers the effects of being pigeon-holed as a female scientist presenting some interesting points that may well strike a chord. In addition to this debate, Ayusman Sen has raised another fascinating topic in his first post of 2011, Why Do We Do Science? The post questions the motivations for carrying out scientific jobs and the recognition associated with being a successful scientist in comparison to an IT entrepreneur:
The remark, of course, begs the question of us practitioners of science: What are we in it for? Certainly not for the money! Public recognition? The last time a scientist appeared on the cover of Time was the cell biologist James Thompson, back in August 2001. In that time, Steve Jobs and Apple have shown up four times. Bill Gates has appeared on the cover of Time nine times. With the hoopla of Mark Zuckerburg being the person of the year for 2010, you would be happy to learn that Time chose U.S. scientists as men of the year for 1960. There were 15 of them (all men!) on the cover.
Away from the debates, David Basanta has been manipulating results from Google Book’s quantitative analysis of literature, highlighting the frequency of certain disease names. His post uncovers some noteworthy findings:
I decided to give it a go using some common diseases such as ebola, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s
Meanwhile …..
Linda Lin’s latest blog post reveals what we currently regard as a relatively enigmatic question, What’s in a Gene? (or miRNA gene really):
Even the few sequences of tiny genes are frustrating puzzles. miRNAs and siRNA are 19-24 bases long, but we still don’t know why every base in them is there. It’s like a word scramble or code of 4 letters, it means something (i.e. if you remove certain miRNAs, you get cancerous tumour growth. dang). E.g. The word “Knowledge,” to English speakers means something. But for someone just starting to learn the language, it may as well be written as “Know-edleg”. They have a partial clue, but not the complete picture. And just as every word in the English dictionary can be unique with some common features..so can every miRNA and siRNA. Sheez.
In Other News …..
The International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW) forum is changing its name to The Digital Scientist. Put out jointly by CERN and Fermilab to cover scientific computing, the publication covers the use of computing in everything, right through from astronomy to zoology. And while their name may have changed, the content of their forum has not; you can still find stories that have appeared in the publication, learn more about computing topics and post questions to your peers.
And finally …..
This week has seen the anticipated ScienceOnline 2011 conference held in North Carolina – a gathering of scientists, journalists, and anyone interested in examining how social media can be employed to disseminate science. Viktor Poor’s latest comic strip illustrates an awkward situation that may arise with their introduction of a new tagging system…..
