This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
Eva Amsen in the Ask the Nature editor forum asks whether there is a definitive resource for looking up the spelling and capitalization and hyphenation of scientific words.“I used MESH to find the proper spelling of gene and protein names, but I’m now trying to find out if it’s “Western blot” or “western blot” or “Western Blot” and find that all three are in use. Southern was a name, but what is the rule for Northern and Western? Is there an OED of scientific language or something equally useful?”
In the Naturejobs careers forum, Paul Smaglik rounds-up news from the web related to scientific careers. Included in his post are links to the recent Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of the ‘top 200’ universities in the world and a report on US state biotechnology initiatives. On a similar theme, Matt Brown provides advice for how to get into science journalism, in a summary of Simon Franz’s talk at the recent Source Event careers fair. Matt’s post is the last of a series of four: previous entries can be accessed via this link.
Have you ever wondered about the differences and similarities between artists and scientists? Can we say that a successful scientist is also, per se a great artist? David Papapostolou is tackling these and related questions on a new blog about the interactions between art and science.
Frank Norman describes the Elucian Islands, a new site in Second Life that includes Nature Publsihing Group’s Second Nature islands. “This new site provides space not just for scientific stuff but the whole range of knowledge and scholarship. It will be interesting to see how it develops”, writes Frank. How long will it be, he muses, before Nature publishes its first paper that can only be fully appreciated in Second Life?
In the biomolecular NMR spectroscopy forum, Evgeny Fadeev introduces the Open NMR project, a NMR wiki (collaborative editing tool) that allows users to search and update the pulse sequence database, create pulse sequence images from wiki text, and to read and write about theory and practice of spectroscopy, software and anything else relevant to magnetic resonance.
Jean-Paul Boucher‘s job is to find and implement technology solutions that will directly impact the medical and scientific research mission of the US Natoinal Institutes of Health (NIH). Social tools like Nature Network “have the possibility to radically transform the way NIH does its business”, he writes, “from direct expertise and material finding between labs (“has anyone used algae for X protocol before?”) to even cross-disciplinary research team collaboration.” He asks Nature Network’s NIH group members what kind of “collaboration” they want NIH to be able to do. Readers are invited to join the group and to give Jean-Paul their suggestions.