Archive for January, 2010

Elucian Islands village in Second Life

Via the Nature Network Second Life forum, Nature Publishing Group has created a new Elucian Islands village. The village is a whole ’sim’ owned by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and covered with labs available for scientists or educators …

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

HIV researchers solve key puzzle after 20 years of trying

Researchers have made a breakthrough in HIV research that had eluded scientists for over 20 years, potentially leading to better treatments for HIV, in a study published today in the journal Nature. The researchers, from Imperial College London and Harvard University, have grown a crystal that reveals the structure of an enzyme called integrase, which is found in retroviruses like HIV. When HIV infects someone, it uses integrase to paste a copy of its genetic information into their DNA.

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Gene function discovery: Guilt by association

Scientists have created a new computational model that can be used to predict gene function of uncharacterized plant genes with unprecedented speed and accuracy. The network, dubbed AraNet, has over 19,600 genes associated to each other by over 1 million links and can increase the discovery rate of new genes affiliated with a given trait tenfold. It is a huge boost to fundamental plant biology and agricultural research.

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Novel studies of decomposition shed new light on our earliest fossil ancestry

Decaying corpses are usually the domain of forensic scientists, but palaeontologists have discovered that studying rotting fish sheds new light on our earliest ancestry.

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Amazon Dot Com IS a different kind of thing. : Greg Laden's Blog

The following Wikio Widget gives a ‘toplist’ of science blog sites. If you feel that any one of these sites is not really a science blog site (a climate denialist site, an anti-vax site, etc.) please contact me and let me know. …

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Ireland! : Pharyngula

There was never such a gigantic lie told as the fable of the Garden of Eden. [Henry Ward Beecher, early American preacher, from "What Great Men Think Of Religion" by Ira Cardiff] …

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Birdbooker Report 103 : Living the Scientific Life (Scientist

The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book …

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Intelligent Robots Evolving : Collective Imagination

About This Blog. The Collective Imagination is designed to explore some of the most compelling issues facing the world today and the ways that science and technology can help us address them. A changing cast of ScienceBlogs bloggers and …

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

The Periodic Table of Wine : bioephemera

Profile. headshotbioE.jpg bioephemera is art + biology - everything from representations of science in art and literature to the neuroscience of aesthetics. read the first BioE post visit the old BioE archive …

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Photo safari - African hunting dogs : Not Exactly Rocket Science

Profile. Ed_Yong.jpg Ed Yong is an award-winning British science writer. Not Exactly Rocket Science is his attempt to make the latest scientific discoveries interesting to everyone. He finds writing about himself in the third person …

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Sunday, January 31st, 2010