Category: Misc.

The start of a slow poop movement?

Well I am not 100% sure I believe all the claims in this but it is fascinating: What Drives a Sloth’s Ritualistic Trek to Poop? | Articles | Smithsonian.  I knew nothing about sloths and their poop until reading this.  The key part of the article to me:

The scientists’ results point to linked mutualisms between the sloths, the algae, and the moths: the sloth climbs down the tree to poop and, because the ground around the tree is littered with poop from previous descents, moth larvae growing in the poop can hitch a ride on the sloth’s back. The moths find shelter and thrive in the fur ecosystem. They also bring nutrients to their new home from the poop they were born in and when they die and decompose. Those nutrients fuel algae growth in the fur, and the algae supplement sloths’ foliage diets with lipids that the scientists speculate could serve as a high-energy snack. Then, when the sloths go down to do their business again, moths hop on their back and the cycle starts over again. 

I think this could be the start of a slow poop movement …

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Wanted from #UCDavis peeps: visual media that integrates “Art and Biology”

Just got this email from Daniel Friedman here and thought I would share (with his permission)

Dear Dr. Eisen

This quarter, within MCB121 a group of students are starting a journal that integrates molecular biology with writing and creative work by campus community members. I am the art editor for the journal, and would be honored if I could solicit a commissioned piece from you to be published in an upcoming issue. Should you so decide to participate in this fun challenge, your prompt would be:

With visual media (digital, pen/paper, paint etc) and no written words, represent, explore, or explain a biological phenomenon that excites you – perhaps from your own research, perhaps just something you have always thought was cool.

It would be awesome to see the intersection of personality and quirkiness of each individual professor’s worldview against the common backdrop of a subject matter that we all know and love. Also, please feel free to send this email to any of your colleagues who might be interested – I have certainly only encountered a small fraction of the interesting campus peoples.

Thank you very much for your time, let me know if you have any questions. Peace,

Daniel Friedman

danielarifriedman@gmail.com

This looks awesome: DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) 2/20

Wow – this looks awesome.  Bummed I can’t be there — DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER)

From their web site:

DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER)
Thursday, February 20, 2014, 6 p.m. (doors open at 5:30)
Keck Center, 500 Fifth St., N.W., Room 100

Free and open to the public. Registration and photo ID required.

Email cpnas@nas.edu by February 6, 2014 to request American Sign Language interpretation.

D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) is a monthly discussion forum on art and science projects in the national capital region and beyond. DASERs provide a snapshot of the cultural environment and foster interdisciplinary networking. This month, in celebration of its third anniversary, DASER explores the theme of art as a way of knowing. Access the live webcast. It begins streaming at 5:30 p.m. EST.

5:30 to 6:05 p.m. Welcoming remarks

6:05 to 6:10 p.m. Community sharing time. Anyone in the audience currently working within the intersections of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work. Please present your work as a teaser so that those who are interested can seek you out during social time following the event.

6:10 to 7:10 p.m. Panelists’ presentations (15 minutes each)

Michele Banks, Artist, Washington, D.C.
Diane Burko, Artist, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Robert Root-Bernstein, Professor of Physiology and Bioartist, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Nina Samuel, Art and Science Historian and Independent Curator, New York City and Berlin, Germany

7:10 to 8:00 p.m. Discussion

8:00 to 9:00 p.m. Reception

DASER is co-sponsored by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS) and Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. DASER fosters community and discussion around the intersection of art and science. The thoughts and opinions expressed in the DASER events are those of the panelists and speakers and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the National Academy of Sciences or of Leonardo.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Carin Bondar video on "Organisms do Evolve" based on Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball

I love Carin Bondar.

Compare to the original

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Worth a look: American Academy of Microbiology report on the Human Microbiome

Definitely worth checking this out: FAQ: Human Microbiome, January 2014. It is a report from the American Academy of Microbiology and it is really well done.  In addition to the report itself there is also and Infographic and a nice little handout.

The report was based on discussions with a collection of Human Microbiome Gurus:

And it was written  by Ann Reid and Shannon Greene. It has a variety of useful tidbits and has a reasonable number of caveats – such as “it should be noted, however, that at this point, most studies, even in mice, are looking at correlations between gut microbiome composition and factors like weight, insulin sensitivity, and other metabolic measures.”

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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#UCDavis encouraging those with the flu to stay home rest and recover

Good to see this. I note – I have a lab policy that anyone who is sick MUST stay home. That forced my home for most of this week despite actually wanting to be in the lab / office for work.

See forwarded email below:

Dear MSOs/CAOs,

Following up on recent news reports about the major flu virus in the Sacramento area, Human Resources has reminded us to please encourage those are sick to please stay home, rest and recover. This will help prevent colleagues and friends from getting the flu.

While it takes about two weeks for the flu shot to work, it is probably not too late to get one since there are least two more months of flu season.

Please circulate this information us as is appropriate in your department/center.

Thanks.

Donna

Donna Watkins Olsson
Executive Assistant Dean

Interesting NSF Funding Opportunity – "Genealogy of Life"

Definitely worth checking this out: nsf.gov – Funding – Genealogy of Life – US National Science Foundation (NSF)

From the web site:

SYNOPSIS
All of comparative biology depends on knowledge of the evolutionary relationships (phylogeny) of living and extinct organisms. In addition, understanding biodiversity and how it changes over time is only possible when Earth’s diversity is organized into a phylogenetic framework. The goals of the Genealogy of Life (GoLife) program are to resolve the phylogenetic history of life and to integrate this genealogical architecture with underlying organismal data. 

The ultimate vision of this program is an open access, universal Genealogy of Life that will provide the comparative framework necessary for testing questions in systematics, evolutionary biology, ecology, and other fields. A further strategic integration of this genealogy of life with data layers from genomic, phenotypic, spatial, ecological and temporal data will produce a grand synthesis of biodiversity and evolutionary sciences. The resulting knowledge infrastructure will enable synthetic research on biological dynamics throughout the history of life on Earth, within current ecosystems, and for predictive modeling of the future evolution of life 

Projects submitted to this program should emphasize increased efficiency in contributing to a complete Genealogy of Life and integration of various types of organismal data with phylogenies. 

This program also seeks to broadly train next generation, integrative phylogenetic biologists, creating the human resource infrastructure and workforce needed to tackle emerging research questions in comparative biology. Projects should train students for diverse careers by exposing them to the multidisciplinary areas of research within the proposal.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Tenure policies not keeping up with the digital revolution

Interesting article in the Chronicle for Higher Education that I was pointed to by Mackenzie Smith:

Digital Humanists: If You Want Tenure, Do Double the Work | Vitae.

The article is by Sydni Dunn – a Staff Reporter at CUE and it discusses a topic of direct relevance the upcoming conference we are hosting here: Publish or perish? The future of academic publishing and careers February 13 – 14, 2013 UC Davis.  The article focuses on some discussions that came up in association with the annual meeting of the MLA – the Modern Language Association.  The discussion was about how to assess scholars in the humanities – especially those who are heavy on the digital side of scholarship.  And the discussion is both scary (to me at least) and fascinating as scholars struggle with how to get their institutions to accept digital scholarship and assess it.

It is definitely worth a read and I note we will have extensive discussions of this general topic at our meeting …

 

 

Important new paper on impact of having women as conveners on gender ratio of speakers

There is an important new paper from Arturo Casadevall and  Jo Handelsman: mBiosphere: Scientific meetings: convening committees with at least one woman boost numbers of women speakers. It was published January 7, 2014 in the open access journal mBio. 

Their abstract

We investigated the hypothesis that the gender of conveners at scientific meetings influenced the gender distribution of invited speakers. Analysis of 460 symposia involving 1,845 speakers in two large meetings sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology revealed that having at least one woman member of the convening team correlated with a significantly higher proportion of invited female speakers and reduced the likelihood of an all-male symposium roster. Our results suggest that inclusion of more women as conveners may increase the proportion of women among invited speakers at scientific meetings. 

IMPORTANCE The proportion of women entering scientific careers has increased substantially, but women remain underrepresented in academic ranks. Participation in meetings as a speaker is a factor of great importance for academic advancement. We found that having a woman as a convener greatly increased women’s participation in symposia, suggesting that one mechanism for achieving gender balance at scientific meetings is to involve more women as conveners.

Basically they conclude that having women serve as conveners for sessions and meetings increases the chance that women will be well represented as speakers.

Much of their key findings are shown in Figure 1

From their paper:  FIG 1  Proportion of women speakers as a function of convener gender composition for the years 2011, 2012, and 2013 at the GM and ICAAC meeting. All comparisons were significant at P < 0.05 by Student’s t test

What to do about this? They have some suggestions at the end of the paper

Whatever the mechanism driving the results, practical actions are suggested by the data. The results suggest that an experiment in which at least one woman is included in every team of conveners might increase the proportional representation of women among the speakers at ASM meetings. An alternative might be to explicitly charge conveners with finding speakers who reflect the diversity of microbiologists. These strategies are worth testing. In the process, we might find that our meetings draw on a fuller arc of talent in microbiology and are enriched by increased gender balance. 

This study suggests a simple mechanism for increasing women’s participation in a critical part of a scientific life. Further research should determine whether discriminatory behaviors contribute to the outcomes and whether the outcomes contribute to the loss of women from academic science.

Some press for this article

Some other things I have written about gender ratio in meetings:
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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New post on ICIS blog about Google Scholar

I have a new post on the ICIS blog about Google Scholar that may be of interest: ICIS: Innovating Communication in Scholarship – Some additional details of my discussion w/ reporter John Bohannon for his Science story on Google Scholar.  The post gives some detail about the discussions I have with John Bohannon in relation to his story that ran in Science today on Google Scholar.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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