Read: A Blog Around The Clock

I like the man who faces what he must,
With steps triumphant and a heart of cheer;
Who fights the daily battle without fear.

- Sarah Knowles Bolton

Too busy all week to write about this, but last weekend we went on a family trip to NYC. Old-timers here may remember that we took the kids there two years ago, so they were eager to visit again. We spent four days there, flying JetBlue (always happy with their service), and generally having great fun. We did touristy things, mainly whatever the kids wanted to do. No online access at all!

So we shopped at F.A.O.Schwartz and at Macy's:

Agriculture Linked To Frog Sexual Abnormalities:

A farm irrigation canal would seem a healthier place for toads than a ditch by a supermarket parking lot. But University of Florida scientists have found the opposite is true. In a study with wide implications for a longstanding debate over whether agricultural chemicals pose a threat to amphibians, UF zoologists have found that toads in suburban areas are less likely to suffer from reproductive system abnormalities than toads near farms -- where some had both testes and ovaries.

Music Went With Cave Art In Prehistoric Caves:

Thousands of years later, we can view stone-age art on cave walls, but we can't listen to the stone-age music that would have accompanied many of the pictures. In many sites, flutes made of bone are to be found nearby.

Undergraduates Forge New Area Of Bioinformatics:

A group of undergraduate students from the University of California San Diego have forged a new area of bioinformatics that may improve genomic and proteomic annotations and unlock a collection of stubborn biological mysteries. Their work will be published in the July issue of the journal Genome Research.

Scientists Set Out To Measure How We Perceive Naturalness:

Natural products are highly valued by consumers yet their properties have been difficult to reproduce fully in synthetic materials, placing a drain on our limited natural resources. Until now ...

Rare Plants And Endangered Species Such As Tigers At Risk From Traditional Medicine:

Two reports from TRAFFIC, the world's largest wildlife trade monitoring network, on traditional medicine systems in Cambodia and Vietnam suggest that illegal wildlife trade, including entire tiger skeletons, and unsustainable harvesting is depleting the region's rich and varied biodiversity and putting the primary healthcare resource of millions at risk.

Wild Orangutans Declining More Sharply In Sumatra And Borneo Than Thought:

Endangered wild orangutan (Pongo spp.) populations are declining more sharply in Sumatra and Borneo than previously estimated, according to new findings published this month by Great Ape Trust of Iowa scientist Dr. Serge Wich and other orangutan conservation experts in Oryx - The International Journal of Conservation.

Looking For The Founatain Of Youth? Cut Your Calories, Research Suggests:

Want to slow the signs of aging and live longer? New Saint Louis University research suggests cutting back on calories could be a promising strategy.

The deadline for your entries for the first edition of The Giant's Shoulders is the end of July 15th (deadline is midnight EDT). Your posts should cover one of the following:

Classic Papers - your blog post should describe what is in a paper that is considered to be a classical paper, or explanation why you think the paper should be considered classical, or foundational, or monumental, or seminal, or mind-boggling/earth-shaking/paradigm-shifting, or just plain cool. Then place the work in some kind of context: historical, philosophical, theoretical, technological, political, social. Try to persuade the readers that the paper is fascinating and really important. The paper cannot be younger than 10 years (thus, a moving target if this carnival lives a long time).

People - analyze the importance of a person in the historical development of science. Most people will cover the famous - Darwin, Newton, Linnaeus, etc. - but it is really cool if you dig out someone more obscure who nonetheless did something really important and we can see the importance from the present perspective.

Concepts - track the development and evolution of an historically important scientific concept and how the attitudes and understanding by the scientists (or lay audience) changed over time due to new discoveries.

The carnival will be posted here on July 16th. Keep track of the news about this carnival at its homepage. And also, please volunteer to host future editions.

Thursday, July 10

6:00 - 8:00 PM

With support from our friends at Burroughs Wellcome Fund, SCONC (Science Communicators of North Carolina) is hosting an introduction to podcasting (think of it as radio over the Internet). National authority Ryan Irelan of Podcast Free America will lead a two-hour session at Sigma Xi on NC 54 in the Research Triangle Park. (click here for directions) Please RSVP to Ernie Hood no later than Tuesday, July 8, or you might go hungry. (bkthrough AT earthlink DOT net)

Last night I thought I had fun, hearing both thunder and fireworks, but these guys could not just hear but also see not two but three spectacular things simultaneously - fireworks (left), comet McNaught (center) and lightning (right). And this was all captured in one of the most exciting photos I have seen recently, bound to win all sorts of "Picture of the Year" contests come December:

Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning, picture taken by Antti Kemppainen:

Click here to see it really big!

Explanation:

In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught has now returned to the outer Solar System and is now only visible with a large telescope. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.

Yes, this is me, Bora Borg, at least parts of it. Ably photoshopped by McDawg:

As expected, most of them are free to download. Peter Suber has all the relevant links:

Open Access Opportunities and Challenges: A Handbook (PDF) by Barbara Malina (ed.).

Science Dissemination using Open Access by Canessa and Zennaro.

Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors (PDF) by Kylie Pappalardo.

I also have Scholarly Journals Between the Past & the Future by Martin Rundkvist.

Heather Morrison just finished teaching her class on Open Access and the student projects are now all online for you to see.

That is, in a nutshell, the conclusion of this study. If you have free access to a lot of literature, you are much more likely to click on links and download PDFs (which hopefully means you will read the papers, learn from them, improve your science, and cite them when writing your own manuscripts). If you know that most of the time you will see a "pay $60" page instead, you don't bother clicking anyway.

Also, this mainly applies to the new papers - the older papers are rarely looked at - so there is no real need to keep archives TA for any lengthy periods of time.

Peter Suber comments.