ResearchBlogging.org News

We’ve assembled a fantastic panel of judges for the Research Blogging awards. Here are brief biographies of each:

• Stacy Baker teaches biology at Staten Island Academy, using her class blog and other online tools to revolutionize high school biology teaching.
• Vaughan Bell is a clinical and research psychologist who is a regular contributor to the amazing Mind Hacks blog.
• David Bradley is a chemist by training and a freelance science writer based in Cambridge, England. He blogs at sciencebase.com and can be found on Twitter as @sciencebase.
• Marc Cadotte is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto who blogs at The EEB and Flow.
• David Dobbs is a science journalist whose work appears in The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine and blogs at Neuron Culture.
• Val Jones is a medical doctor who is CEO of Better Health, a site that certifies and collects medical blog posts.
• Dave Munger is a writer who serves as editor of ResearchBlogging.org and blogs at The Daily Monthly.
• Chad Orzel is Associate Professor of Physics at Union College, author of How to Teach Physics to your Dog and blogger at Uncertain Principles.
• Jennifer Ouellette is author of two books on physics as well as the founder of Cocktail Party Physics. She is director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange.
• Gavin Schmidt is a climatologist for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space studies and a founding member and blogger at Real Climate.

This astounding group of individuals (plus me) has graciously volunteered to narrow our list of nominated blogs down to 5–10 finalists in each category. Nominations close on February 11, and the finalists will be announced February 25. (There’s still time to nominate your blog! Click here.)

We’ll have separate judges for the non-English-language blogs, which I’ll list in a separate post.

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

• The end of gravity as we know it? Sarah at SarahAskew explains a radical new theory of gravity that would displace it as a “fundamental” force of nature!
• Fossil feather colors really ARE written in stone. I’m linking to this one before the biologists select it!  GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life gives a great detailed description of recent advances in determining the color of feathers of fossilized dinosaurs!
• Hydrogels or, how to replace petroleum-based plastics. What is non-fluid, transparent, and flexible?  Would you believe… water?  Aimee at misc.ience explains.
• Girls and Math – Part I. Daniel at Ingenious Monkey takes on an important and often contentious topic — the mathematical abilities of girls v. boys — and recent research on it.  Also take a look at part II.

Finally, let me note a practical post by Dr. Shock at Dr. Shock MD PhD: research on 10 Websites With The Best Information on Depression.

Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” highlights!

Vincent Racaniello selects several notable posts each week from molecular and cellular biology and virology. He blogs at virology blog.

• HIV protease inhibitors act by binding to the active site in the hollow center of the molecule. The compounds still fit into the active site of drug resistant proteases but do not remain there. A new type of drug might be able to bind to alternate sites on the protease, enabling the current anti-HIV drugs to remain in the active site.
• Eukaryotes shuttle molecules about the cell by using membrane coat proteins that can fuse together to create vesicles that bud from one membrane, and fuse with another. Membrane coat-like proteins have been found in bacteria by searching for proteins with a similar three-dimensional structure.

I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.

We’ve had a tremendous response to the Research Blogging awards, with hundreds of nominations! Below is a list of the nominations so far. Check to see if your favorite blog is on the list, and if you don’t see it, head over to the Awards page and submit your nomination. You can also nominate your own blog. There are just six days left to nominate a blog!

Read the rest of this entry »

Jarrett Byrnes focuses on posts in ecology, environmental sciences, and evolution. He blogs at I’m a chordata, urochordata!

• Grrrlscientist reports on new work that uses rotting fish to help us understand the utility of the fossil record for understanding what features we share with our primitive ancestors.

• As the DC zoo sends pandas back home to China, consider how forest fragmentation influences Panda conservation strategies.

• New work shows that Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately and take data to study the effects of climate change on native and invasive species.

Travis Saunders selects several notable posts each week from Health and Clinical Research. He blogs at Obesity Panacea.

• Whose Demons? PalMD of White Coat Underground considers how a physician’s perceptions about substance abuse can lead to moral, rather than medical solutions.
• Be Religious and Live Forever! Epiphenom explains why religious believers make poor estate planners.
• HIV and Herpes, Together Forever.  Herpes simplex infections increase the risk of HIV transmission.  Acyclovir reduces herpes simplex levels in the blood.  So does Acyclovir reduce the risk of HIV transmission?

Travis

Dave Munger selects several notable posts each week from psychology and neuroscience. He blogs at The Daily Monthly and has a weekly column on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM.

• Two amazing posts from The Thoughtful Animal about how animals find their way home. First, ants: a series of awesome experiments on desert ants including blinfolded ants and ants on stilts. Second, gerbils. Is it just me or are gerbils actually dumber than ants?
• Have you ever wondered if time “flying by” is really a sign of how much you enjoyed yourself? BPS Research Digest covers a clever study showing how the perception of time affects enjoyment.
• Similarly, with back pain: Does moving awkwardly cause back pain or do we move awkwardly because we have a painful back? Body in Mind examines the evidence.
• Finally, is it possible to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder using an MRI scan? It might just be, says the Corpus Callosum Blog.

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

• Doctor Who and the Silver Spiral. Via Megan at Rigel, follow Doctor Who as he travels to the Silver Spiral and explains the physics behind a supernova!
• Evo. Anthro. Study Suggests You Might Be Running Wrong. I always suspected something like this!  Brian at Laelaps describes research that suggests that fancy running shoes don’t reduce impact injuries as much as adopting a good barefoot running style.
• Un-Natural Disasters. Bryan at In Terra Veritas discusses an intriguing way to look at “natural” disasters: though due to natural processes, most of the “disaster” part comes from a lack of risk management.
• You and your ugly avatar. The virtual world has proven to be a fascinating laboratory for studying social interactions!  David Bradley at Sciencetext describes research on the relationship between the appearance of one’s online avatar and the attention that avatar receives from others.

Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” highlights!

Vincent Racaniello selects several notable posts each week from molecular and cellular biology and virology. He blogs at virology blog.

• We get measles once in our lifetimes but influenza much more frequently. Both viruses encode error-prone RNA polymerases, but the influenza glycoproteins are structurally more plastic than the measles counterparts – leading to escape from neutralizing antibodies.
• Drugs that target host functions required for viral replication are attractive as antivirals because viral escape mutants are less likely to emerge. But when they do, new viral functions may develop.
• In polyglutamine disorders such as Huntington’s disease, multiple CAG codons accumulate as a result of replication errors. Gene silencing may be used to treat these diseases because RNAi may be designed to target only the mutant allele.

I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.

Jarrett Byrnes focuses on posts in ecology, environmental sciences, and evolution. He blogs at I’m a chordata, urochordata!

• So, you’re a wasp. You’ve evolved a nice mutualism with local fig trees. Time to relax? No! Time to figure out how to cheat the system! But be careful, because those figs will fight back.

• Want to test evolution via natural selection? Why not do it with robots! What could possibly go wrong.

• When one things of Genetically Modified (GM) plants, they think about the consequences of new genes in the environment. However, heavy application of herbicide in fields of GM herbicide resistant crops can exert such a strong selective pressure on weeds that they become herbicide resistant, too. Ah, unintended consequences.

• Dr. M reports on unfortunate new work showing that popular fishing grounds are essentially treated like garbage cans. And most of it is from recreational folk.