ResearchBlogging.org News

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

• As a little tyke, I always thought dinosaurs with huge crests or sail adaptations for body cooling was awesome. Turns out, dinosaur sails, horns, and more might not be quite so PG.

• I admit it, I’m a sucker for good science history (check out The Age of Wonder, folk!) So check out this introduction to Louis Agassiz and early marine biology in the U.S..

• Why have a symbiotic relationship with an alga when you can just steal its chloroplasts!

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

• Echoes of the past. We begin with teofilo at Gambler’s House, describing fascinating speculation that the former residents of Chaco Canyon may have chosen the site for their home based on its acoustic properties.  (I’ve resolved to visit the site one day.)
• “You just call out my name…”: Friendships in Male and Female Baboons. Male and female baboons have long been known to form friendships not related to reproduction, but why?  Brian at Laelaps discusses research done in Kenya to answer this question.
• The teapot effect, end of. Finally, aimeew at misc.ience shows again how science, in this case physics, is constantly working to make our lives better!  Researchers have come up with a solution for “the teapot effect”; I’ll let you click through to the link to find out what that is…

Check back next week for more miscellaneous highlights!

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 »

Have you ever wondered how the ResearchBlogging.org content editors choose their weekly Editor’s Selections? Over on Seedmagazine.com, I interview four of our content editors to find out how they do it. They also look back at their favorite posts of 2009, and give some insight into the future of science online.

Click here to read the whole interview on Seedmagazine.com

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

• Every virus has some way of meddling with interferon pathways, and stealth influenza is no different
• It may be a dog-eat-dog world out there, but nowhere is the competition fiercer than in the female reproductive tract
• Finding a way to grow bacteria without a cell wall provides a glimpse into a world before these microbes evolved

I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.

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

• How did Leishmaniasis reach the highland desert of Northern Chile 1000 years ago if the parasite requires tropical mammals as a host?
• Chameleon camoflage is not a myth: these critters do change color to camouflage themselves from predators
• A new anti-cancer role for p53: it enhances the post-transcriptional maturation of several miRNAs with growth-suppressive function

I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.

My interest in highlighting peer-reviewed research online derives from my teaching experience. Students, especially as they start college, are naive about the verity of anything they see on the screen. Wikipedia has certainly replaced Britannica as the single source most commonly cited – and students are sometimes outraged when faculty require peer-reviewed sources.

Some interesting attempts to blend the peer-review mechanism with the vitality of the open-source world of wiki are springing up. Scholarpedia has a system of named authors, peer-review of entries, and curatorship of existing articles. Focusing on a narrow band of topics, they seek to develop what will become print encyclopedias through collaboration. Citizendium imports from Wikipedia but has a form of review and limits to public edits.

These build in elements of review, but that does not make it a peer-reviewed entry. Volunteers rather than solicited reviews, and the push to fill the intellectual domain described generate pressure towards acceptance rather than rigor.

The Open Source movement has the interesting characteristic of opening the door to a wider range of critique – but also to spammers, editing wars, and other problems. The experiment is still unfolding; it remains to be seen whether the promise can be fulfilled.

The BPR3 logo, when used in blogs, will identify content that derives from one person’s reading of the research. Commeners may differ, but the original text will remain. There is, however, some possibility that content from a BPR3 posting may be lifted into a wiki format – perhaps with an attempt to carry the BPR3 logo with it, even though the content cannot be maintained intact.

The “B” in BPR3 adds an important element – discernible authorship – so that readers are able to recognize not only the original source of the research but also, over time, the reliability of the blogger.