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Best of Nature Network, NPG staff blogs and Scitable: 6 - 12 August

Best of Nature Network, NPG staff blogs and Scitable: 6 – 12 August

Earthquakes in New York? A rare 5.8 magnitude earthquake shook the east coast of the United States this week. Our Boston blogger, Tinker Ready, explains how Boston and the surrounding areas were affected: It was the East Coast’s most powerful earthquake in 67 years. Because of the solidity of the earth’s crust on the eastern seaboard – unlike California, where there are networks of active faults – earthquakes tend to be felt over longer distances here, according to Thomas Herring, a geophysics professor at MIT. Check out her post for a seismogram of the quake. The News Blog has also  … Read more

Best of Nature Network, NPG staff blogs and Scitable: 13 - 19 August

Best of Nature Network, NPG staff blogs and Scitable: 13 – 19 August

A “high” point for genomics The News Blog revealed this week that the raw sequence of the Cannabis sativa genome was posted on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud computing service by a new company called Medicinal Genomics. And in case you’re wondering: the DNA was extracted and prepped for sequencing in a laboratory in Amsterdam! McKernan says he was turned on to the idea of sequencing cannabis by a 2003 publication in Nature Reviews Cancer about the many potential uses – including fighting cancer – of cannabinoids. C. sativa makes about sixty of the compounds. Although THC has gotten the most  … Read more

Best of Nature Network, NPG staff blogs and Scitable: 6 - 12 August

Best of Nature Network, NPG staff blogs and Scitable: 6 – 12 August

Paige Brown has been shedding some light on the miniscule world of NanoArt, taking a peek at art on the scale of 1/1,000,000,000 (1 billionth) of a metre. Paige explains that in the nano world, materials can act and look very differently from the way they do in the macroscopic world. Take a look at this piece by Rami R M Louca called ‘Flower’ – a scanning electron microscope image of titanium dioxide nanowires.  Read more

Best of Nature Network, NPG staff blogs and Scitable: 30 July - 5 August

Best of Nature Network, NPG staff blogs and Scitable: 30 July – 5 August

Volcanoes are the topic of the day for the Frontier Scientists, looking at different ways of monitoring eruptions. There are some beautiful pictures including this short film of the Martin Luther King Vent of the volcano Pu`u `O`o in February 2005, when the highest fountain reached about 10 meters into the air.  Read more