CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-09 19:07:08 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 2 +1s)

Try this! But only if you prepared to be sucked in. Especially if you're a geography buff and hate to be wrong...
I've played twice: 9,825 and 12,245.
(h/t +Mathew Ingram)

2013-05-09 18:15:58 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

It's a trap!!
(http://xkcd.com/1195/)

2013-05-09 16:02:57 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Eureka!-gram is a new collection hosted on the publishing platform Medium (from +Evan Williams's Obvious Corp) that attempts to capture that Eureka! moment as it happens in the lab or in the field.

I'm looking for that cool piece of raw data that gave you particular insight, brought you clarity, or changed your thinking about your experiment. It can be an image, a squiggly line, a blob in a gel, an equation or anything. Just point out what we should be looking at, consider including your smiling, victorious self with your data and write up a brief description of what the experiment was, what it changed for you and maybe even what the next step will be.

Instagram may have your lunch, but Eureka!-gram wants your raw data. I'm hoping this might be a fun and informative way to demonstrate what happens behind the closed doors of the lab. Read more below and send your submissions... more »

2013-05-01 17:12:16 (7 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

I've muted more people on Google+ than I'd care to admit.








(947)

2013-04-25 16:43:50 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

60 years ago today, Watson, Crick, Franklin and Wilkins all published back to back to back papers in Nature exploring the physical structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid. Read all of the classic 1953 papers for free here, at +Nature News & Comment's old 50th anniversary celebratory web focus!

2013-04-22 21:14:37 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

In honor of the finalists being announced for the annual Best Visual Illusion contest (all 2013 finalists will be released when the winner is announced on May 13,) here are the previous 8 winners.

On +BuzzFeed 

2013-04-22 14:44:30 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

"The problem with humans is that they only celebrate 'Earth Day' once a year." -- Every other living thing on Earth.

2013-04-18 16:23:02 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

NYC people-watching at 780 frames per second (from +Jason Kottke)

2013-04-08 18:23:16 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

"Subways of North America"

[http://xkcd.com/1196/]

2013-03-27 17:23:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

The Collaborative Oncological Gene-Environment Study yields74 risk factors, but even more questions over cancer cause-and-effect.

2013-03-26 15:52:18 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 0 +1s)

The biomedical research enterprise in the US has become unsustainable and urgent action is needed to address a variety of problems, including a lack of innovation, an over-reliance on soft money for faculty salaries, the use of graduate students as a source of cheap labor, and a ‘holding tank’ full of talented postdocs with limited career opportunities.

2013-03-25 19:42:34 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Cheez-Its for dinner. Listen to your +Mother Jones...

2013-03-22 17:53:34 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

33 Nudibranch images, the abstract art projects of the sea...

2013-03-20 19:25:56 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Five of the world's longest-running experiments remind us that science is a marathon and not just a sprint.

[Via +Nature News & Comment]

2013-03-12 16:01:29 (2 comments, 5 reshares, 9 +1s)

7 million years in 70 seconds. (via +edith zimmerman)

2013-03-07 21:39:17 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

It turns out that when [Nate] Thayer decried "the state of journalism in 2013," he was unintentionally shining a light on issues much larger than not paying freelancers.

I hate everything.

2013-05-11 10:56:21 (0 comments, 9 reshares, 13 +1s)

I can't get enough of these hi-def nature GIFs... (from http://headlikeanorange.tumblr.com/)

2013-05-11 11:46:54 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

Amazing GIFs created from HD nature documentary footage. Check out the tumblr here: http://headlikeanorange.tumblr.com/

(via +Becca Rosen)

2013-03-05 19:32:16 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

New proposed theory suggests bunnies may have done in our Neanderthal relatives...

2013-03-05 18:49:55 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 11 +1s)

Computer viruses (from http://xkcd.com/1180/)

2013-02-27 23:28:39 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

BREAKING NEWS: Nature Publishing Group and Frontiers form alliance to further open science. NPG has purchased a majority share of the Frontiers platform.

2013-02-27 20:03:07 (1 comments, 4 reshares, 4 +1s)

CSI: FRIENDSTER -- An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network

2013-02-27 19:59:27 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

A brief explainer on what sequestration would do to U.S. science funding, if it goes into effect on Friday. (via +BuzzFeed)

2013-02-27 17:52:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Where once there was the genome, now there are thousands of ’omes. Nature goes in search of the ones that matter. Have a go at our crossword and read the feature http://www.nature.com/news/big-biology-the-omes-puzzle-1.12484

2013-02-26 19:25:19 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

More than 80% of British shoppers would be happy to buy fruit and vegetables which are not perfect in shape or color. How nice of them.

2013-02-26 18:17:50 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Nature gets gruesome. +Ed Yong, always on top of the Darwinian necrophilia beat, reports on psychopathic male frogs that can drown a female, but still get her eggs out to fertilize them.

2013-02-24 13:38:19 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

It seems 50% of science journalism is simply having the willpower to resist forcing a square peg (sexy, just-so story) into a round hole (reality.)

2013-02-17 18:45:01 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

What does the media get wrong about the "neuroscience of love?" Lots of simple stuff...

2013-02-15 18:49:06 (2 comments, 7 reshares, 6 +1s)

Here's a map of every known meteorite fall & landing on Earth.

2013-02-15 17:38:07 (8 comments, 5 reshares, 13 +1s)

Asteroids = rocky bodies with no atmosphere orbiting the sun.
Meteors = objects streaking and burning up through the atmosphere.
Meteorites = whatever bits of the meteor that survives the journey & impact.

Now you know.

2013-01-27 02:42:30 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Do we really want to squeeze cute things?? Researchers brought subjects (and cute animal pictures) into the lab and gave them bubble wrap to find out...

2013-01-24 18:29:32 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Proper brain development is highly dependent upon sensory experiences in early life. From the minute you are born, the light entering your eyes began to tune the responses of cells in your visual cortex and shaped the overall growth of your visual pathways. And your parents' cuddles and caresses drove the development of your somatosensory system, the pathway that detects touch and pain.

Now a team of American researchers provides evidence that sensory experiences before birth play an important role in development of the eye. In a series of experiments performed on mice, they found that light in the womb regulates the growth of blood vessels and the number of neurons in the retina. The findings, published last week in the journal Nature, could improve our understanding of eye diseases that can cause blindness in premature babies.

by +Mo Costandi 

2013-01-22 18:29:59 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

New modeling work on an old paradox suggests a trade-off between cancer risk and reproductive potential, via +Nature News & Comment.

2013-01-22 17:57:24 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

In open access, journals that charge authors high fees aren't necessarily the most influential. A new online interactive tool suggests shows that a journal's fees do not correlate particularly strongly with its influence, as measured by a citation-based index.
http://www.nature.com/news/price-doesn-t-always-buy-prestige-in-open-access-1.12259

2013-01-22 17:15:09 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 3 +1s)

Since we're so bad at self-reporting, this should come as no surprise: College students grossly overestimate their Facebook usage. What is surprising is that they overestimate, not underestimate...

2013-01-10 19:41:56 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

The latest foreclosure horror, the "zombie title," is just insane. Banks are now walking away from foreclosures deemed not worth their time much the same way homeowners with delinquent mortgages did after threats of foreclosure.

2013-01-10 19:33:51 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

New arXiv paper shows that airport delays propagate through the network like a spreading wildfire.

2012-12-21 12:46:54 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 4 +1s)

+Richard Van Noorden continues his year-end wrap-ups by presenting 2012's papers that were most-discussed on social media. Used +Altmetric data for this endeavor...

2012-12-20 13:15:59 (19 comments, 116 reshares, 139 +1s)

Number of research papers published in 2012 by leading science nations and the proportion of that work within the top 1% of cited papers of the same age in their respective fields.

via +Richard Van Noorden 

2012-12-20 12:48:02 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Over the last 355 days, disintegrating ice, spectacular sunbursts and minuscule lizards are among 2012’s most striking pictures.

via +Nature News & Comment 

2012-12-20 12:44:53 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The 2012 year in review from +Nature News & Comment. ENCODE, higgs, Hurricane Sandy and more...

2012-12-14 14:53:22 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Human beings tend to avoid places that smell of urine. But to mice, there is something positively addictive about the scent; they like to go back to a spot where they found the excretions again and again. Now, researchers have discovered that this behavior is triggered by a single protein in the urine of male mice.

2012-12-12 22:45:53 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

Earliest evidence for cheese making in the sixth millennium B.C. in northern Europe

2012-12-11 21:38:19 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

Yesterday, +Sebastian Seung launches EyeWire, an online portal likened to a "3D coloring book" designed to crowd-source the reconstruction of neuronal connections. From Sebastian:

To find better means of fixing the brain, we first need to achieve something more fundamental. We must understand how it works. Now it's my turn to ask a question to the public: Can you help us succeed? I'm tremendously optimistic about the future of my discipline, yet understanding the brain is so difficult that we neuroscientists need help. You may be surprised by my appeal. Isn't neuroscience an esoteric subject only for people with advanced degrees?
You can imagine the brain as an enchanted forest of 100 billion trees, because neurons sprout delicate branches. The forest is so vast that we neuroscientists can never explore it all by ourselves. We need help from the public. To be an... more »

2012-12-05 17:50:54 (0 comments, 5 reshares, 4 +1s)

City birds incorporate cigarette butts into their nests to ward off parasites (since tobacco leaves are rich in compounds known to repel arthropods.) This seems to be an urban variation of an ancient adaptation.

via +Nature News & Comment 

2012-12-04 17:07:55 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

To tell the age of a lobster or other crustie, just count the (eye stalk or gastric mill) rings, like a tree!!

2012-12-03 21:49:00 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Mind Blown.

(via +Boing Boing)

2012-12-03 20:26:05 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

via +Jason Kottke...

2012-12-03 19:14:49 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

A data center that runs on "natural" gas.

2012-11-30 16:33:55 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

Amazing time-lapse video of the planet from ISS.