Scienceblogging: Scientopia – a Q&A with SciCurious and Mark Chu-Carroll. Announcing PLoS Hubs: Biodiversity | The Official PLoS Blog. Hello there! If you enjoy the content on The Official PLOS Blog, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed. Today we are pleased to officially announce the launch of PLoS Hubs: Biodiversity, a new pilot Web site to connect the biodiversity community with relevant open-access research and accelerate progress. The vision behind the creation of PLoS Hubs is to show how open-access literature can be reused and reorganized, filtered, and assessed to enable the exchange of research, opinion, and data between community members. PLoS Hubs: Biodiversity provides three main functions to connect researchers with relevant content.
First, open-access articles on the broad theme of biodiversity are selected and imported into the Hub. In time, the content will also be enhanced so that the articles are connected with data, and we will provide features to make the articles easier for people to use. At first, all the featured open-access content will come directly from PubMed Central.
Scientopia. Guardian science blogs. PLoS blogs. Central Science. SciBlogs NZ. Scientific American. Wired. Discover. What’s the sound of yellow ochre? MCGILL (CAN)—Chemists have discovered that a technique known as photoacoustic infrared spectroscopy could help identify the composition of pigments used in artwork that is decades or even centuries old. Details of the work are reported in the journal Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy. The technique is based on Alexander Graham Bell’s 1880 discovery that showed solids could emit sounds when exposed to sunlight, infrared radiation, or ultraviolet radiation. “The chemical composition of pigments is important to know, because it enables museums and restorers to know how the paints will react to sunlight and temperature changes,” explains Ian Butler, lead researcher and chemistry professor at McGill University.
Advances in mathematics and computers have enabled chemists to apply the phenomenon to various materials, but Butler’s team is the first to use it to analyze typical inorganic pigments that most artists use. More news from McGill: www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/ Chemical blogspace. Sarda Sahney | University of Bristol | Papers - Academia.edu. Arghhhh!!! Us vs. Darwin. What a week! We hadn't expected for the publicity on our paper in Biology Letters to be quite so extensive and controversial. And we certainly hadn't intended to be cast opposite to Darwin. On the one hand we have had some unfortunate exaggerations, most notably the Huffington Post which writes Darwin May Have Been WRONG (Seriously does the editor think putting it in all caps makes it true?)
But on the positive end we have had some more fair minded reporting of the research, a few examples: By the way, if you are interested in reading the paper for yourself it is available to download at my academia.edu page. Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback and some critical thinking towards the research. Sahney, S., Benton, M.J. and Paul Ferry 2010.