ResearchBlogging.org News

The universe is expanding, and so is the science blogosphere.

Following the announcement last week of scienceblogging.org, there are two new science blogging networks that have launched in recent days.

On Tuesday, The Guardian, a legacy media institution, launched a small but impressive science blogging network, that will reside alongside the main science blog. Check out Alok Jha’s introductory post, and then check out their four new bloggers. They are: are Martin Robbins, Jon Butterworth, Evan Harris and GrrlScientist.

In addition, on The Guardian’s main science blog, there will be a science blogging festival throughout September. The festival started Wednesday, with a post from Mo Costandi of the Neurophilosophy blog, on psychedelic drugs. Follow them on twitter: @guardiansciblog.

Also on Wednesday, PLoS launched a new blog network as well! In addition to the in-house blogs that they have (such as the everyONE blog), they have a series of other blogs – most of which should look familiar. They have a post up describing the philosophy and organization of their network, and their community manager Brian Mossop has a post up detailing the origins of the network with some good background on PLoS, their intentions to create a “niche network,” and links to all the new blogs. Follow them on twitter: @plosblogs.
Here are the blogs in no particular order:
Speakeasy Science: Deborah Blum

The Language of Bad Physics: Sarah Kavassalis

Body Politic: Melinda Wenner Moyer

Wonderland: Emily Anthes

Take As Directed: David Kroll

Neuroanthropology: Daniel Lende and Greg Downey

Obesity Panacea: Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders

Gobbledygook: Martin Fenner

GenomeBoy: Misha Angrist

NeuroTribes: Steve Silberman

The Gleaming Retort: John Rennie

Finally, an important reminder for those who have moved their blogs: make sure you re-register your new blog with Research Blogging! Instructions can be found here.

Each week, Dr. Peter Janiszewski selects several notable posts from Health and Clinical Research. He blogs at Obesity Panacea.

Here are some of the past week’s most intriguing discussions:

• Mahjong epilepsy? Kevin Zelnio gives everyone a good reason to take it easy when playing mahjong. If you fail to heed Kevin’s advice, you just may end up having a seizure.
• Creatine has been used as an ergogenic supplement by athletes for many years. Despite much evidence to the contrary, the supplement retains a heavy stigma in the popular press. Colby Vorland of Nutritional Blogma discusses the discrepancy between scientific evidence and naive hysteria.
• Apparently, bariatric surgery is the second most common abdominal surgery in the US. Dr. Arya Sharma breaks down a recent JAMA study looking at the safety of this popular procedure.
• Need another reason to go to the gym? Check out Greg Laden’s discussion of new evidence pointing to neuroendocrine mechanics by which exercise attenuates appetite, and how inactivity may increase it.
• Low-carb/high protein diets; bad for your bones? Steve Parker of Diabetic Mediterranean Diet blog speaks on a new study which suggests the answer is a resounding “Nah!”

Check back next week for some more riveting discussions of health and clinical research!

Peter

Jason Goldman selects several notable posts each week from Psychology and Neuroscience. He blogs at The Thoughtful Animal and at Child’s Play.

• “Distorted perceptions and an altered state of mind: two reasons why psychedelics have always attracted not only fascination, but also controversy for decades.” Noah Gray at Nature Blogs has curated a mini-carnival of sorts centering around a new paper called “The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: implications for the treatment of mood disorders.” Included are posts by Mo at Neurophilosophy, the Neuroskeptic, the Neurocritic, and Vaughan of Mind Hacks. (Note: Only Neuroskeptic’s and Neurocritic’s posts are indexed by Research Blogging, but all are being included for completeness.)
• John M. Grohol at World of Psychology tells us that Narcissistic College Students Spend More Time on Facebook.
• Mike Lisieski of Cephalove concluded a short series about octopodes with The Case for Cephalopod Consciousness.
• At the Mind Matters blog, David Berreby explains Why A Good Friend Has the Same Effect As a Warm Fire.

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

• Measuring Gravity: Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thing.  Gravity is one of the fundamental forces of nature, but also one of the most difficult to measure precisely; a recent experimental measurement of the gravitational constant has shown significant deviation from the accepted value.  Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles looks at a variety of recent gravitational measurements, and explains the implications of the recent discrepancy.
• Snapshots of magnetic fields.  While we’re talking about things that are hard to measure, let’s talk about magnetic fields!  Magnetic fields are extremely difficult to measure with nanoscale precision and in the time domain, in marked contrast to measurements of other quantities.  Joerg Haber of All That Matters discusses recent techniques for measuring such fields.
• Spices as antiseptics… maybe.  Spices can add lots of “zing” to your food, and make some people suffer while eating it, but do they serve an even more important biological function? Thomas Kluyver at Thomas’ Plant-Related Blog looks at the evidence that the use of spices has served an antiseptic purpose in food preparation, and the limitations of that evidence.
• Tauromaquia Today.  And now for something completely different! Bécquer Medak-Seguín of Hispanic Studies Forum discusses a dispute in the interpretation of artist Goya’s collection of etchings on bullfighting, La Tauromaquia.

Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” selections!

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

• Studies on the microbial ecology of the BP oil spill revealed over 900 species of bacteria, 16 of which were greatly enriched compared to the surrounding water without oil contamination. These psychrophilic microbes are largely novel and contain a large number of genes involved in oil degradation.
• Adenoviruses lytically infect one cell type (epithelial cells), leading to shedding of infectious virus, and another cell type for latent infection. One mechanism of latency involves inhibition of synthesis of the viral cell receptor, CAR – the occupied sign.
• MRSA, the antibiotic resistant form of Staphylococcus aureus is a major problem in hospitals. A novel approach to control of these pathogens involves incorporating bacteriophage lysins into nanofibers to create stable bactericidal paint films.

I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.

Each week, Dr. Peter Janiszewski selects several notable posts from Health and Clinical Research. He blogs at Obesity Panacea.

Here are some of the past week’s most intriguing discussions:

• Have you ever wondered: what would be the effect of eating a Big Mac and following it up with a vodka and Redbull, specifically among Brazilian men? No, well some researchers thought it worthy of investigation. TwoYaks of Geneflow discusses this interesting study.

• Not yet convinced that acupuncture is completely a placebo effect? I have a feeling that even the most devout believers in the effectiveness of needle pricking will be persuaded otherwise by a new study eloquently discussed by Orac of Respectful Insolence.

• Scicurious of Neurotic Physiology talks female orgasms and ejaculation. Fascinating stuff that is sure to make you blush, and maybe have an orgasm… (sexy photos included).

• The concept of muscle memory when concerning resistance training has always been thought to be of neural origin. Colby Vorland of Nutritional Blogma discusses a new study suggesting another important player in this physiological phenomenon.

How is that for some cool science?

See you next week for another installment.

Peter

Jason Goldman selects several notable posts each week from Psychology and Neuroscience. He blogs at The Thoughtful Animal and at Child’s Play.

• Livia Blackburne asks what something called “visual noise exclusion” has to do with dyslexia. She classifies the post as “intermediate-advanced,” but it’s a good concise explanation of this complicated research finding.
• People have been studying learning in aplysia, the sea hare, for decades. Bjorn Brembs has studied this critter himself for 10 years, but never saw one in the wild, until a recent trip to San Diego. There may be a reason that aplysia can learn.
• Christian Jarrett of BPS Research Digest is hunting successful psychopaths. What is a successful psychopath? “…Thanks to their superior self-control and conscientiousness, rather than landing in prison, they end up as company chief executives, university chancellors and Queen’s Council barristers. Well, that’s the idea anyway.”

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

• Unmasking Eoanthropus dawsoni, The First Englishman. This post was too late for the special “fools, failures and frauds” edition of The Giant’s Shoulders history of science blog carnival, but it is a perfect researchblogging post!  Krystal D’Costa of Anthropology in Practice discusses the infamous discovery of “Piltdown man”, and how national pride, among other things, muddled the field of anthropology for decades.
• Cylons and Smelloscopes: False Positives and False Negatives in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. In recent years, the search for extraterrestrial life has heated up with the ability to search for Earth-like planets outside our solar system.  At his eponymous blog, The Astronomist describes the techniques for searching for life on other planets, and the pitfalls of such techniques.
• What’s the point of the semantic web? Anyone who has been around long enough to remember web searching pre-Google knows how far the quality has improved.   But can it be done even better, and how?  David Bradley at Sciencebase explains the limits of current search engines, and describes how the “semantic web” could fix those limitations.
• Friday(ish) Focal Mechanisms: Samoa’s hidden rupture. Though our understanding of earthquakes has increased tremendously in modern times, there is still much to learn and many subtleties in every recorded event.  Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous discusses research that indicates that last year’s Samoan earthquake was much more complicated than previously appreciated.
• Whatever Happened to Seismosaurus? Finally, Brian Switek of Dinosaur Tracking takes a look at a dinosaur that drew a lot of attention in the 1990s — Seismosaurus — and explains why we don’t hear anything about it any more!

Check back next week for more miscellaneous suggestions!

Soon after my two posts on science blog aggregation, Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker contacted me asking for my input on a site they were thinking about creating.

The three of us had similar ideas: Now that many leading bloggers from ScienceBlogs have moved elsewhere, there’s no central place readers can go to find out what’s going on in science blogging. Anton and Bora realized that a basic hub for science blogging wouldn’t be difficult to create from existing tools: Wordpress software and a few key plugins. So, after a couple weeks’ discussion, we put together a first-stab at a science blog aggregator in a few days. You can find it here:

Scienceblogging.org

The site is really just an aggregator of aggregators. Everything you see on the front page is a feed from some other bundle of blogs. In a couple cases, we made our own bundles using Friendfeed. The site is flexible enough to add additional bundles as bloggers and publishers form new blogging communities. It’s not ideal — I think the ultimate science blog aggregator will allow users to view blog posts by topic, and perhaps have some way of identifying the best posts. But it’s flexible enough that with some input from the community, we might be able to shape it into something really special. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

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

• Wright was wrong! A tale of how science works, genetic drift, and why a case is never closed.

• That beautiful marine snowfall you see in deep-sea videos is really kinda gross, and yet it is a essential to ocean health and carbon sequestration.

• Man and cephalopod unite through the new science of Connectomics! (well, through comparative anatomy, anyway)

• What can the Serengeti teach us about the evolution of menopause? Go ask your grandmother.