Beetles in the Bush has the 47th edition of the Circus of the Spineless up! A nicely laid out post with 16 fabulous submissions spanning a wide range of terrestrial, marine and aquatic critters.
Matthew Sarver from the Modern Naturalist
is hosting edition #48! You can submit entries via his contact page.
Loads of buggy fun at The Birder's Lounge, host of this month's edition of the Circus of the Spineless. Go on now, scurry away and read it.
Send your spineless submissions for next month's carnival to Bug Girl! Check out the CotS homepage for more updates and info.
Don't forget to check out the Carnival of the Blue too! Hosted this month by Sea Notes, a blog from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Send next month's submissions to Mark Powell at Blogfish.
Ed, the keeper of the Invertebrate Diaries, has the 36th edition of the Circus of the Spineless up! Head over there straight away for all your boneless entertainment.
The next edition of the Circus of the Spineless will be held at the Invertebrate Diaries. Send in your submissions from this month to edwbaker at googlemail dot com by Midnight GMT Saturday, February 28th. The Circus is scheduled for Monday, March 2. Looking forward to all the de-boned articles!
Like the planarian of the 8th grade science science fair projects I used to judge, or the arm of a sea star in our deep blue realm. - Yes We Can
Like a tardigrade outside the International Space Station, frozen under the permafrost of Antarctica or dessicated on a moss-covered pine. - Yes We Can
Like a crayfish molting in order to grow, a hermit crab searching for a new shell, a polychaete building tube of mud and stone - Yes We Can
Like the metamorphosis of a lepidopteran, a beetle and dragonfly; a physical change brings about a change in habitat, a change in lifestyle. The Circus of the Spineless is a celebration of all creatures missing the backbone, started in 2005 by Tony and Nuthatch. Last fall the management was unable to keep up with life and managing the blog carnival. I decided to take it over last week in order to keep the spirit alive and keep together the cohesion of a tight-knit, excellent community of nature bloggers. There is nothing out there that is like the Circus of the Spineless. Being a purveyor of that particular "95%" of animal life it was only appropriate!
Please contact me by leaving comments at the Circus of the Spineless or emailing me at kzelnio at gmail dot com. Now, on with the show!
A N N E L I D A
A R A C H N I D A
C E P H A L O P O D A
C N I D A R I A
D E C A P O D A
I N S E C T A
I N S E C T A - C O L E O P T E R A
I N S E C T A - D I P T E R A
I N S E C T A - H Y M E N O P T E R A
I N S E C T A - N E U R O P T E R A
I N S E C T A - O D O N A T A
I N S E C T A - O R T H O P T E R A
I N S E C T A - P H A S M A T O D E A
I N V E R T E B R A T A - O E C O L O G I A
The 20th edition of the Carnival of the Blue is up at Biomes Blog for all your oceanic oratories. Go there and say hi to Eunice, the 3 foot bristle worm!
Check out the latest Carnival of the Blue up at the fabulous WaterNotes! Lots of great writing from our ocean blogging colleagues.
There was an astonishing amount of entries to this edition of the Carnival of Evolution. I can tell this one is here to stay. The fifth edition promises to continue the high quality of submissions we have seen thus far. A real potpourri of evolution from paleobiology to development, education to speculation.
"Now, we can talk about controversies on the tree of life. How closely related are we to Neanderthals? That’s a great question in science. The question is not “Are we related to Neanderthals?” Biologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists have skirmishes over portions of the tree of life. None of them argue that they are on it.Drinking deep from the literature, Aydin of the Snail's Tales discusses a quote from a 1915 text:
But that’s not what Explore Evolution would have us believe. They want to foist a particular notion, the “Orchard of Life” on high school students. No one in biology talks about the orchard of life..."
"Had the biologists indeed abandoned the evolutionary theory at the turn of the 20th century, evolutionary explanations of biological phenomena would by now be an almost-forgotten chapter in the annals of biology."
"these arguments may seem convincing to anyone who hasn't taken intro biology, but any undergrad worth their auto-pipette should be able to see right through Professor Jones' nonsense."
"Yet we are to believe that a “designer” capable of creating extremely complex systems–of the kind that humans cannot presently create–went back again and again to legs in order to design vertebrate wings. Which is just as evolution predicts, in the tetrapod context. Would anybody ever expect that of an alien?"Grrl Scientist discusses new research on everyone's favorite evolutionary transition fossil, Tiktaalik!
"The new study reminds us that the gradual transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles required much more than the evolution of limbs"
"What is exciting these days is that progress in neuroimaging and in genetics make it possible to think about self-regulation in terms of specific brain-based networks."Nagraj, one of the Hoxful Monsters, discusses new research on the origin and evolution of microRNA's in animals.
"Micro RNAs present in plants and algae have a different gene structure, biogenesis and targeting properties from those of animals, and these miRNAs are not found in fungi. Based on the above facts it's generally considered that miRNAs in plants and animals had independent origin."
"Personally, I think one of the most amazing aspects of this study was just how quickly these flies evolved to survive and develop perpetually in severely low oxygen conditions. In only 32 generations the flies were able to live in oxygen conditions completely lethal to normal flies."
"Heritability deals with the likelihood or probability of traits running in families. But here is the catch: something can be heritable due to genetics or environment. In this case the environment includes culture or habits and behaviors that you experience and accept as a normal and everyday. Everything that shared among related individuals isn’t necessarily because they share the same genes."
"The fun of evolution isn't in looking back - it's in looking forward. So let's take just one moment to release a barrel of monkeys into evolution and the future we're so upset about. Instead of the glass being half-empty, it's merely awaiting the next set of species to fill it."
The Other 95% is hosting the next Carnival of Evolution on Saturday, November 1. Put links in the comments to anything you read relating to evolution for my consideration.
Kristjan Wager (no relation to Pascal) has the 116th Tangled Bank collection online at Pro-Science!
Mike Haubrich also has the 4th edition of the Carnival of Evolution up at Clashing Culture. I'll be hosting the next edition of the Carnival of Evolution here on November 1st. Send me your submissions through the blog carnival submission form or leave the links in the comments!
Praxis, the blog carnival about "scientific life", has landed here at The Other 95%. Welcome and make sure you look around at the work of my spineless co-blogger Eric and myself. The last edition was held at Life v. 3.0. Make sure you submit to Praxis #4 to be held at The Lay Scientist. Go ahead and host one yourself as well! Now on to the carnival.
Open Access Day and 5 Years of PLoS!!!
It was Open Access Day yesterday which (nearly) coincided with the 5th year anniversary of PLoS on October 13. PLoS asked "Why does open access matter to you". Check out all the replies aggregated in the Synchroblogging Competition post!
Difficulties of Being a Scientist
KH at Lecturer Notes ponders junior faculty naivete. Head over there to remind KH that making mistakes is part of the learning process!
The Rock Doctor at Life v. 3.0 has a post up describing her thoughts on being different from her friends. Science often takes people down an interesting path that neither social circumstances, religion or personaly/family history can control. You either succumb to the mold or let the journey carry you onward.
Bill at Open Reading Frame reminds everyone that no goes into science to get rich by plotting monthly salary versus experience. The results? Go there and see his analysis!
Searching for a job is no easy task. We all have our ideals. A nice salary, maybe able to purchase that first home, live in a nice area with plenty of weekend adventure opportunities and culture. But the job we want isn't always there or isn't always yours. That is why Physioprof over at Drugmonkey reminds us to cast a wide net when job hunting!
Is Biology Chemistry?
Bora from A Blog Around the Clock waxes poetic on Green Fluorescence Protein winning the Nobel prize in Chemistry. For some reason he seems to think the "nobel" jellyfish isn't deserving of the prize. Oh, I guess some people got the prize not the jelly. My bad. But he has several comments on what discerns Medicine/Physiology from Chemistry. The line is often blurred in the awarding of the Nobel Prizes. The don't join the bandwagon rant resonates with me for sure!
Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata also weighs on the GFP Nobel issue and concludes that "funding agencies [need] to support a broad range of chemical and biological research". Find out why at Terra Sigillata!
Revolutionizing Peer Review
Cameron Neylon at Science in the Open offers up a few ideas about bringing peer review into the 21st century. This includes taking into account online articles (such as blog posts), wiki-style reviewing, open reviewing, aggregation after review, and much much more. Be sure to follow the excellent comment thread. Cameron also offers up his personal view of open science. If you are not a "believer" in open access and open science after this post (the 1st in a series), then there is no hope for you or you must work for "that one". Superbly done.
Bjorn Brembs also puts out an excellent post about transparent peer review, but has a different take on it from Cameron. It starts with a discussion forum, ends with a journal publication. But it is what happens between those two stages that is important.
Do it for the Children?
Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science supports the progress of women in science but asks a very important question of a german initiative. Should women with kids get special treatment for scholarships? There are lots of underlying assumptions with this, be sure to read through the comment thread as well. Zuska also weighs in with her thoughts.
Fight the Power!
Sick of Thomson-ISI or just want an open source alternative to EndNote? After hearing about Thomson Reuter's bogus lawsuit against George Mason University, where the open source referencing software Zotero was made by Dr. Daniel Cohen, for violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base (i.e. reverse engineering the .ens file format), I decided to give Zotero a whirl. It rocks and it integrates well with NeoOffice, the open source word editting software made for the Mac platform. Kevin Smith from Scholarly Communications@Duke distills down the copyright issues associated with the lawsuit. He has many excellent points and concerns, such as:
"In general, open source software is a gift that many universities like George Mason give to the academic community as a whole, and the value of that gift is increased if it is possible for scholars who have been using a costly commercial product to move their research resources from the latter into the former. That increased value (an “externality” in economic jargon) could be weighed against Thomson’s loss (which they allege is around $10 million per year) in reaching a reasonable decision about contract enforcement."Somewhat on the topic of Thomson, at least the use of their metric, John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts mentions the joint response of many journals from the History of Science, Technology and Medicine fields to the stupidity of index metrics.
"We now confront a situation in which our own research work is being subjected to putatively precise accountancy by arbitrary and unaccountable agencies."Larry Moran at the Sandwalk kindly reminds us that scientists, too, can be activists. The picture of Haldane raising his fist, passionately lecturing a large crowd of the "United Front" is priceless. What scientists are standing up with the people and demanding answers to pertenant issues of our day?
We're hosting Praxis October 15th and have very few submissions so far!! Surely you all have something to say about how science? Such as:
"... all aspects of life as an academic, whether it's the lifestyle, career progress, doing a Ph.D., getting funding, climbing the slippery pole, academic life as a minority, working with colleagues and students, dealing with the peer-review process, publishing, grants, science 2.0, amusing anecdotes, conference experiences, philosophical musings, public engagement, or even historical articles about what life was like in the good (or bad) old days."So leave your submissions in the comments here or email them to me (address in the sidebar)! You have till midnight October 14th!
Another great Linnaeus’ Legacy is up over at PodBlack Cat with killer entries that generated keywords in my filter of ants, sex, PhyloCode, ants, komodos, genebank hell, ants, fishmongers, genebank hell and your ass.
Welcome to the 24th edition of the Boneyard. The blog carnival for everything old. Zach gave a good carnival last month, but there was something missing. Something obviously out of place. After pondering about it all month I realize this blog, The Other 95%, was the only blog that submitted a palaeo-invertebrate entry out of 15 total links. 1 out of 15, that's 6.7%, meaning that the amount of vertebrate entries were 93.3%. I was shocked, flabbergasted! While this edition will also be laden with vertebrate-centric scriblings, I'll will even out the score and ensure that at least 93.3% of the links, images and video for this edition more accurately reflect the diversity of animal life. Enjoy!
I won't be able to get the Boneyard up and running till I get off work tonight. Which gives YOU till 8pm Eastern US time to get your last minute Boneyard submissions in! Everything will be counted. Remember, you make the difference in blog carnivals by participation! You can also submit articles you liked from blogs other than your own! They don't have to be invert related, we are just an invert blog here! Hurry!
Next week on Oct. 7 I am set to host the Boneyard blog carnival! The Boneyard is a collection of blog posts on all things palaeo. Lets get lots of palaeo-invert posts!
I need your submissions so dig through your strata and dust off the fossils you have buried under all that other muck. Leave a comment with link here or email me (address over there in the sidebar -->) submissions. Submissions do not have to be from your own blog. You can submit entries you liked that other people wrote too.
