Communities Happenings – 20th December

Welcome to the brand new Staff Blogs!

Last week we launched the nature.com blogs network, the new home for blogs written by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) editors, staff and occasional guest bloggers.

You can find Nature’s News blog, Nature Chemistry’s Sceptical Chymist and Nature Medicine’s Spoonful of Medicine here on the site. If you haven’t already read our introductory post, we also host the staff blogs which originally lived on Nature Network: Bioentrepreneur’s Trade Secrets, the NatureJobs blog and the Nature Protocols blog, now called Stepwise.

We also have our guest blog, Soapbox Science and our local community blogs for London, Boston and New York. In the side bar of every blog page, you can find a full set of links to all 18 active blogs plus 7 archived blogs. Find out more about the improvements in our introductory post and stay tuned over the coming week as we individually introduce each blog.

Finally, to find updates about naureblogs, you can find us on Twitter and Google+.  The nature.com Facebook page  posts wider updates of nature.com’s activities including staff blogs.

Help with the Higgs hunt…

Researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have caught a glimpse of what could be the elusive Higgs boson – although they have not definitively discovered it yet.

To tie in with this, on Wednesday Nature held a live web chat with Bill Murray, senior Higgs researcher at the LHC’s ATLAS collaboration, and Gordon Kane, a professor of physics at the Universityof Michiganin Ann Arbor.

Screen shot from the live talk 

You can find out more about the search for the Higgs and what the latest results mean, in their post.

Focus on France

Launched in 2005, the annual Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science recognize outstanding scientific mentorship and focus on a specific country each year. 2011’s focus is France and on Tuesday Nature honoured three French scientists for their outstanding efforts to mentor young researchers: Jean Rossier, Moshe Yaniv, and Barbara Demeneix. You can find out more in the press release.

Don’t forget that if you are interested in events held in France, we also have a Paris Calendar listing scientific events in and around the area.  The calendar is moderated by MyScienceWork, an open access scientific research network. As well as focusing on open access, MyScienceWork are particularly interested in Women in Science and are currently in partnership with the international program, L’Oréal-UNESCO’s For Women in Science .

Please 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

#YuleTubeCalendar

We’re edging ever closer to Christmas as we count down the days in our #Yuletube calendar, the online advent calendar we’ve created to celebrate our love of both science and music.

Check back each day in the approach to Christmas to reveal a new YouTube video which alludes to a science story from 2011. Can you guess which story we’re referring to? Leave your answers in the comments, or tweet using the hashtag #yuletubecalendar.