elephant autoportrait

elephant paints autoportrait [link]

Debunking junk science

A TED talk by science writer Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor of Skeptic magazine.

Demographics of the review process

Grod et al. (2008) Systematic variation in reviewer practice according to country and gender in the field of ecology and evolution. PLoS ONE 3(9): e3202.

An inverse relationship between publication output and beer consumption

Grim T. (2008) A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists. Oikos 117(4): 484-487.

Attack of the flies!

The 12 genomes are out!

Check out the relevant papers in Nature, Genome Research, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Biology, Genome Biology.

Elephant on a trampoline

I couldn't resist (doing reseach on elephants and all)... a great animation movie!

Webservers for detection of positively selected residues accounting for 3D protein structure

Three webservers so far that estimate ω (=Ka/Ks=dn/ds) taking into account the protein's tertiary structure (PDB ID):

- SELECTON by Tal Pupko's group at Tel Aviv University

- SWAKK by Laura Landweber's group at Princeton University

- Ka/Ks w/ 3D-windowing by David Liberles' group at the University of Wyoming

What's the impact factor got to do with paper quality?

Postma E. (2007) Inflated impact factors? The true impact of evolutionary papers in non-evolutionary journals. PLoS ONE 2(10):e999.

Too much ado about high impact factor journals. Evolutionary papers in lower-ranking non-specialized journals are undervalued. A call for a more elaborate journal classification system including field-oriented impact factors.

Intense sweetness surpasses cocaine reward

Lenoir et al. (2007) Intense sweetness surpasses cocaine reward. PLoS ONE 2(8):e698.

A cool experiment showed that rats prefer saccharin-sweetened water (calorie-free) to intravenous cocaine. The authors speculate that intense sweetness being a supernormal stimulus can override homeostatic and sel-control mechanisms and lead to addiction – greater than cocaine addiction! In most mammals sweet taste perception is primarily owed to the existence of two G-protein-coupled receptors (T1R2 & T1R3) that evolved in sugar-free ancestral environments not adapted to really sweet conditions.

RAxML black box

RAxML comes now in a new webserver flavor called RAxML Black Box. This is in addition to the RAxML webserver on the CIPRES Portal.

Accepts multiple outgroups (thanx, Alexis :-), does DNA and AA (not combined), accepts partitioned alignment (mixed models), emails a link to the results URL.

Brought to you by Alexandros Stamatakis & Jacques Rougemont.