Tag: science communication (Page 1 of 2)

Illusion-schmillusion, if I fits, I sits.

Engaged in a cupboard reorganization spree, we never anticipated it. Sujayita, my wife, was folding her purple woollen cardigan in order to stash it in a drawer. The cardigan has a woollen belt that runs through a solitary buckle at the back of the waist. The belt was on the bed, and I happened to lay it out in form of a closed circle. Whoosh! Our cat baby Widget Greything (a.k.a. Baghum, the bitty hauspanther), who seems adept at Disapparating and Apparating at will, appeared right at the center of the circle, nonchalant, in a statuesque manner.

“Whoa! It’s true, what they say about cats and geometric shapes,” I exclaimed.

“Of course. There are studies that show this too,” Sujayita said. “But not all cats, though, you know. . .”

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Asparagus, Odorants and SNPees; with a hat tip to SciAm’s Steve Mirsky

This morning I chanced upon, via that inexhaustible font of newsly tidbits otherwise known as Twitter, this fresh Scientific American essay by veteran science writer Steve Mirsky expounding upon a commonplace phenomenon that has been a lasting mystery as well as, interestingly, a source of conversation around science —the strong smell in urine following the consumption of Asparagus, that well-loved, delectable vegetable of Le Printemps known to mankind since 3000 BCE.

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Communicating Science via Images: Power and Responsibility

There is no denying the fact that visual representations —photos, graphics, and video— play a significant role in telling a story and conveying a concept. Even if the adage from early twentieth century, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, may have lost its charm a bit in this age of easy digital image/video manipulation, it’s not difficult to imagine why images and illustrations would have a tremendous impact in the communication of complex content, such as science communication. As James Balm (@JustBalmy), blogger and Social Media Assistant for BioMed Central, explained in an informative 2014 post:

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Sciencebloggers and SIWOTI – A Science Communication Research Project

A couple of days ago, Paige Brown Jarreau, my Scilogs co-blogger (“From the Lab Bench“) and our intrepid, supportive, Scilogs-Community Manager, launched her own crowdfunding project on experiment.com to fund her research work on science communication. It is a worthy effort, and her results will be Open Access, which is an awesome plus. Please do visit her blog as well as the project page to support her endeavor if possible.

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“Holy” Liver Transplant, Batman!

ResearchBlogging.org

A friend of mine pointed me to this rather… interesting (for want of a better word) study the other day. (What can I say? I have interesting friends!) Published in the journal Liver Transplantation (an organ of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases), the paper is entitled: Religiosity Associated with Prolonged Survival in Liver Transplant Recipients1 by Bonaguidi et al. of the Institute of Clinical Physiology of the National Research Council of Italy and the University of Pisa.

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My First Complete Wikipedia Article And An Appeal

I have been editing Wikipedia articles on topics related to Microbiology and Immunology for a long time. I am fascinated by the concept of Wikipedia, and despite my initial misgivings about the authenticity of the contents, I have often found, at least for relatively non-contentious topics (read: not-religion, not-politics), the articles are of reasonably high quality, well-researched, well-referenced.

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What Science’s “Sting Operation” Reveals: Open Access Fiasco or Peer Review Hellhole?

The science-associated blogosphere and Twitterverse were abuzz today with the news of a Gotcha! story published in today’s Science, the premier science publication from the American Association for Advancement of Science. Reporter John Bohannon, working for Science, fabricated a completely fictitious research paper detailing the purported “anti-cancer properties of a substance extracted from a lichen”, and submitted it under an assumed name to no less than 304 Open Access journals all over the world, over a course of 10 months.

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