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One of the Mars orbiters (Mars Global Surveyor) did extensive spectrographic mapping of the minerals on the surface of Mars. Opportunity has landed in an area that is apparently rich in hematite. Seven of the eight ways this hematite can be formed involve the presence of water. Opportunity will be used to determine if the hematite was water based or volcanically based. Some details here

BioMedCentral publishes lots of free access journals.

The PLoS information site indeed runs on Linux, but it's perhaps worth mentioning that the PLoS Biology journal itself runs on a rather less open platform. Kudos to PLoS for their launch though.

For more on the ever-expanding open access movement in science, see Peter Suber's excellent blog: Open Access News.

Also, check out the other major open access publisher, BioMed Central. BioMed Central launched in 2000 and has already published more than 3000 peer reviewed biomedical research articles.

The PLoS information site indeed runs on Linux, but it's perhaps worth mentioning that the PLoS Biology journal itself runs on a rather less open platform. Kudos to PLoS for their launch though.

For more on the ever-expanding open access movement in science, see Peter Suber's excellent blog: Open Access News.

Also, check out the other major open access publisher, BioMed Central. BioMed Central launched in 2000 and has already published more than 3000 peer reviewed biomedical research articles.

> History is full of examples of people who were overlooked for the Nobel Prize. [...] The prize isn't something people "earn" and it's not something that you're entitled to. It's something that one particular group of people decide to bestow upon you because you've done significant work in their view.

Various scientists quoted in the biomedcentral article suggest that the decision may be very legit, even if controversial:

So why did the Nobel committee disagree? Primarily, some leading scientists say, because the approach to scanning first proposed by Damadian was surpassed by a technique using gradients in the magnetic field developed by Lauterbur and Mansfield.

An article from the National Academy of Sciences' Beyond Discovery Web site sums up this argument: "An essential technical advance that opened up the ensuing widespread application of NMR to produce useful images was due to chemist Paul Lauterbur, who was then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1971, he watched a chemist named Leon Saryan repeat Damadian's experiments with tumors and healthy tissues from rats. Lauterbur concluded that the technique was insufficiently informative for locating and diagnosing tumors and went on to devise a practical way to use NMR to make images," it says.

[...]

What all this illustrates, says another prominent Canadian researcher R. Mark Henkelman, professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, is the difficulty of pinpointing the eureka moment in scientific endeavor.

"This is probably one of the hardest prizes, as making MRI a reality in the medical domain involved many, many people," he told The Scientist. "It's very hard to go back to the beginning and stick your finger on one guy with one bright idea."

Nevertheless, Henkelman thinks the Nobel committee did the right thing. "I think he [Damadian] had a real insight on NMR and cancer and that there might be differences in tissue with pathology that might show up with magnetic resonance, but that's not what this prize is given for, the prize is given for MR imaging and that really belongs to the other two people."

[...]

Richard Ernst, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, takes a philosophical view on the whole thing.

"It's not a very pleasant issue," he told The Scientist. "There are always arguments about who deserved it most. You have to just live with the facts and the reality and accept your fate.

Or perhaps DNA accumulated from other sources. Like endogenous retroviruses.

That is retrovirues that have transcribed their RNA into DNA and merged it with out genome. About 8% of the genomic DNA is from ERVs i.e. they exceed by far the number of protein-coding gene sequences.

So the question is what are they doing there?

Do they help mediating jumping genes?.

When did they arrive?

Are they involved in schizophrenia or any other diseases?

Find out more here or here.

Greg Bear has put this to good use in some of his recent books: "Darwin's Radio", "Vitals" and "Darwin's Children".

Nope.

http://www.biomedcentral.com

http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org

If you read this other article you get the distinct impression that scientists in this field want to make the results of these big key reseaches freely available. They even say in these changing times, probably referring to the increased expected opennes prompted by the internet. (And possibly open source as well).

You see the same "changing times" with the journals. In my research field they found out that a paper that's freely available on the internet gets quoted at least three times as often as a paper that's "locked away" in a "proprietary" journal... (Couldn't find the link I was searching for for that figure, sorry).

Reinout

The German parliament which has just adopted DMCA-style provisions to outlaw the circumvention of technical protection measures that control and curtail the fair use of intellectual property (and only needs the other House's assent for part of the new legislation) makes Germany the third country, following Denmark and Greece, to implement the highly controversial "monstrosity" known as the European Union Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC.

This move, allegedly a "propaganda victory" dubbed "lex Bertelsmann" (after the giant media conglomerate expected to line their corporate pockets under the new laws) in furious disapproval by tech-savvy parts of the news media, makes Germany one of the early adopters setting an unfortunate precedent for further European countries like the UK and France whose citizens, and notably developers like Linux kernel guru Alan Cox, will probably not be spared from similar legislation for much longer either.

Although open-source researchers, cyber-rights activists and even the ruling Social Democrats' very own IT experts as well as hardware manufacturers underlined the severe dangers and inconsistencies of this new and doubtful philosophy extending copyright law to reduce many of the general public's rights to insignificance, in a debate focusing only on academic exemptions from the publishers' power grab, the opposition even tried to tighten the government's bill, ignoring widespread experiences of Chilling Effects such as censorship and assaults on the Freedom to Tinker during the past four years under the EUCD's U.S. counterpart of draconian "bad law and bad policy", the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act, another overreaching implementation of the

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Syndrome.

The last health scare there was the bird flu, which happened the winter immediately following the reversion to Chinese rule. Coincidence? Or a result of the Hong Kong population's lack of immunity to mainland Chinese germs due to former travel limitations, creating a new breeding ground? (The latter is just my own wild speculation.)

From the articles that I have read on this very suspect claim it hints that they used the same method as was used with Dolly. I did my Senior Thesis on Geron, the company that purchased the rights to the methode that cloned Dolly; therefore, I have a fare understanding of what is involved with Nuclear Transfer. Although I am not an expert and have never attempted the process in a lab, I have read enough to know that it is a terrible idea to try this on humans at this point.

There is a easy to understand FAQ on the Roslin Institute web site written by the people that actually cloned Dolly. Here are some interesting highlights:

Are clone embryos like IVF and normal pregnancies?
Not so far. The scientists at the Roslin Institute, who pioneered this work, have repeatedly found that the clone foetuses grow much larger than normal ones, and there is a much higher chance of the pregnancy failing, of stillbirth, or of forced Caesarean sections. Dolly was the one successful pregnancy of more than 277 embryos.

What do the experts think? "I think you are always going to run the risk of having aging DNA," says Professor Lord Robert Winston, an IVF pioneer. "I would hate to think of a child of mine being cloned because I think it would be very likely he would have an accelerated aging process." Dr Jamie Grifo, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at New York University, says: "Cloning is no better than any of the other treatments that are out there. A biological child is the husband's sperm, the wife's egg. A clone is not a biological child." Dr David Stevens, of the Christian Medical and Dental Society, asks: "Are we really willing to sacrifice hundreds of embryos - developing human beings - to make one baby who may suffer monstrous consequences?"

So, there are two very important points that must be stressed. The first is that there is a high percentage probability of genetic defect supported by further experiments. Think of the threat of genetic abnormalities in a fetus that managed to survive as much higher than if you had children with immediate family members.

The second is that each cell has an "age" that is determined by the number of times that a cell has divided. If you use DNA from adult cells that have divided many times, than all of the cells cloned from that DNA will be older. A cell can only dived around 50 times before it dies at which point you reach the Hayflick Limit. Although there are ways to prolong the life of cell lines similar to the way cancer spreads through a body, I doubt that this group of individuals thought of adding telomeres back to the end of the chromosomes that would be used to clone a human baby.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/startajo urnal

As a graduate student in the biomedical sciences, I wholeheartedly agree with what the article says about professional journals and copyright. It's a racket. You have to publish your work to advance, and the most prestigious scientific journals require you to sign the copyright over to them and pay a fee for each page and figure. Then they have the audacity to charge a subscription fee, as well as take in advertising revenue and sell your name to junk mail lists (yes, there is science spam and junk mail too). You're actually supposed to get permission to use one of your own figures in a talk or other type of publication.

On a brighter note, I was quite pleased last week when I received the first issue of a new journal called The Journal of Biology. This publication aims to be a top rank journal on par with Science and Nature, but follows the "open access" approach. Specifically, there will never be a subscription fee, all content is available online for free, and most importantly, authors retain copyright of their papers. I think this is a huge step in the right direction. Harold Varmus, the former director of the NIH, was a big supporter of open access, and I think the time is ripe for this kind of change. This journal's publisher BioMed Central seems to be leading the way in this direction. Good for them! I hope to be sending lots of papers their way!

-margaret

ps if I posted part of this before, I'm sorry. My hand accidentally bumped the enter key. New keyboard.

Weirdly enough, I JUST ran across this item.

I know that story is about ELF radiation, HOWEVER, there have been conclusive studies which demonstrate that it's not high frequency which affects the body so much as it is low frequency, and pulse and amplitude modulation of high frequency carriers which cause the negative effects biochemists and behavioralists complain of.

In non-iodizing power levels and at the right frequencies, cancer cells speed up their rate of division by as much as 100 times. Sorry. No links, but if I'm around in the next hour or so and people are interested, I'll key in some quotes from Robert O. Becker's book, "Cross Currents."

The reason engineers and physicists have such a problem accepting that EM is dangerous is that they can't find any mechanical way for EM to cause any kind of effect on cells other than heating and ionization, neither of which are the causative agents.

Well. . .

Guess what? There IS a simple and accepted system by which cells are easily affected by EM. I recommend that book I linked to. It's only $20 and it's very well written by a respected non-quack. Give it a look if you think of yourself as well-informed.

Anybody who still does as they're told by the big corporate media manipulation, (i.e., believes there is no danger in EM radiation), should also probably take up smoking, because as you have surely heard from similar big-money interests, there's no danger in that, either.

-Fantastic Lad

Sort of like how Slashdot competes with the quasi-monopolies held by the magazine industry in order to provide information to geeks who can't afford to buy magazines that check their facts, etc. :-)

Not a good analogy at all. Open journals will be peer reviewed, just like closed journals. BTW: there is *already* a series of open biological journals that seem quite promising -- Biomed Central -- check them out here

The article itself and the write-up are both wrong to say that "only Genome Biology and PubMed Central" have accepted the terms of the PLOS.

• PubMed Central is a repository of papers that are published in journals. It's an NIH (US government) initiative to ensure that electronic science articles are archived permanently. It's not a journal in its own right so it doesn't really make sense to talk about it accepting their terms.
• Genome Biology is one of many journals published under the BioMed Central banner which makes primary research articles freely available online. Copyright is retained by the author. Articles are indexed in PubMed, archived in PubMed Central and metadata is harvestable through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol. There are over 40 BMC journals.

Of course, the costs of processing text and organising peer review need to be covered somehow. BMC plan to charge for non-primary content (e.g. review articles) and we are considering introducing a fee for publication (which would be waived for scientists with limited funds). The cost to the biomedical community of funding research communication by this type of fee would be an order of magnitude less than the current model of charging for access to published work.

The big advantage of making science articles open-access is that indexing is made a lot easier. A biological version of ResearchIndex (aka citeseer) would become possible. Also, you can find open-access research using Google and you don't need to be in an institution with expensive subscriptions to journals to read it.

http://biomedcentral.com/

--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.