"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." Terry Pratchett
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh 16-17 June 2009 The aim of this national conference is to bring together practitioners in the teaching of science disciplines in HE to share their experiences, identify common challenges and an opportunity to share effective practice. The programme will include keynote lectures; short oral presentations; hands on workshops; posters and exhibitions.
Anne O'Tate: A tool to support user-driven summarization, drill-down and browsing of PubMed search results. Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration
Call for the internet. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.
The Ministry of Health in Viet Nam has confirmed two new human cases of influenza A(H5N1) virus infection, the first human cases to have been reported from Viet Nam since November 2005.
Researchers have measured concentrations of bacteria in the cabin air of 12 commercial passenger aircraft and found that flying may be safer than we think.
Scientists at the University of Calgary have developed a way of fertilizing the bacteria that exist in heavy oil reservoirs in order to improve recovery of hard-to-develop energy.
EndnoteWeb, RefWorks, Connotea, CiteULike, Zotero, Mendeley. Nice summary of the state of the art by Martin Fenner. Conclusion - not much to choose in some ways - personal preference!
There is seemingly consistent and compelling evidence that there is no association between breastfeeding and breast cancer. We challenge the assumption follows that milk borne viruses cannot be associated with human breast cancer.
Ciguatera poisoning is caused by the consumption of tropical reef fish that have assimilated ciguatoxins through the marine food chain from toxic microscopic algae.
It’s a rich, rich source of information and interaction. But it’s doing my head in. That’s why Jim Hendler’s blog post last Friday hit home so well. His piece is about finding the time to blog, which itself is an issue for me. But if I add to that the distraction of Twitter, the problem is compounded. I keep thinking back to Richard Hamming’s remarks about sustaining that 10% extra effort in your science so as to reap long-term benefits in progress and productivity. And I wonder if blogging and twittering has soaked up that time from my schedule. I think it might have.
Since the reason for the variable degree of success of online social tools for scientists is largely attributed to the lack of participation, I think a great way to pull in participation by scientists would be to offer that kind of value up-front. You give it a paper or set of papers, and it tells you the ones you need to read next, or perhaps the ones you’ve missed. My crazy idea was that a recommendation system for the scientific literature, using expert-scored literature to find relevant related papers, could do for papers what Flickr has done for photos.
DEFRA has confirmed that foot and mouth disease movement restrictions will be lifted outside the Risk Area on Wednesday 15 October in parallel with the lifting of the foot and mouth protection zone in Surrey.
Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 4381 journals in the directory.
The Ministry of Health of the Democratic Republic of Congo has declared an outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever. As of 26 December, WHO is aware of 34 suspected cases including 9 deaths associated with the ongoing event.
Much of twentieth century biological research has focused on a limited number of model organisms, such as Arabidopsis, C. elegans, mouse, Drosophila, and E. coli. But biology wasn’t always done this way.
Web2.0 technologies continue to grow, both in diversity and usage and have the potential to impact all areas of learning. How can a bioscientist navigate the technologies of Web2.0 and why should you bother? The Centre for Bioscience would like to bring together examples of Web 2.0 which enhance student learning or academic scholarship. The day will advocate useful approaches rather than advocating particular programmes.
The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.
In the UK 164 people have died of variant CJD, which originally came from cows infected with BSE, and all cases to date shared the same version of the prion gene (MM). A new case has a different varian tof the gene (MV). Estimates are that up to 350 people could be affected in this new wave.
The h-index (Hirsch Number) is a metric that is increasingly becoming of interest to researchers, especially in the light of the REF. An h-index is “a number that quantifies both the actual scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist“. You can work it out manually, but to be honest you’d need to be mad or a bibliometrics fiend to want to.
A Texas algae farm will commence operations on April 1. 1,100 acres of saltwater ponds will produce 4.4 million gallons of algal oil and 110 million pounds of biomass annually.
This study shows that Campylobacter bacteriophage can easily be isolated from free-range chickens and form part of the normal microbiological biota of environmentally exposed birds.
It may seem remarkable that, 23 years after the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), there is still denial that the virus is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).