Public Library of Science

Ginger Campbell, who runs the great Brain Science Podcast project, was kind enough to feature Greg and myself for her 97th episode. We discussed The Encultured Brain with Ginger for over an hour, and now the podcast is up:

Neuroanthropology: …

There’s the story of a young Chinese American couple planning on getting married, but on the day of the proposal the bride-to-be confesses to her fiance that she has hepatitis B. Then there’s the one about a Korean immigrant family …

I’m a little behind on my reading, so I only just got to last week’s New Yorker. In it, I discovered a remarkable, thought-provoking essay by superstar psychologist Paul Bloom. It’s called “The Baby in the Well: The …

Suerie Moon and John-Arne Røttingen from Harvard University call for WHO member states to embrace new approaches to governing the global research and development system.

This week at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, WHO member states are debating how …

This Week in PLOS Pathogens:

Wild plants interact with many other living entities such as animals, insects, other plants, as well as their physical environment. They are also often colonized by many microbes, including fungi, bacteria and viruses. In this …

It is near impossible to escape the commanding news headlines: The horrific details that are emerging about the years of violent captivity of three women in a home in Ohio; The fifteen year old Californian teenager who was allegedly sexually …

Citizen Cyberscience was at the honour at the University of Geneva on April 22-23, 2013. Tweets below cover the afternoon talks. Continue reading »

This week Larry Lewis, PhD, contributes a book review.

Dan Fagin, director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University, does a great job in “Toms River” of describing the environmental catastrophe in Toms River, NJ. …

Spiders are everywhere (Arachnophobes, stop reading now). They’re among the most successful predators on earth today and colonize nearly every terrestrial habitat (that is, not just ceiling corners and under beds), and occasionally do so in numbers large enough to …

For someone who was lucky enough to grow up and live in a country where guns aren’t household objects, it is difficult to understand America’s addiction to guns and the political resistance to gun control measures despite support for some …

It’s something you learn in high school – there are two basic approaches to cellular life – prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) and eukaryotes (the rest of us – aardvarks, amoebae, apricots, etc.). Prokaryotes have an open-plan office, with all biological …

The following new articles are published in PLOS Medicine this week:

Continuing with the series providing a global perspective on integrating mental health, Sylvia Kaaya and colleagues discuss the importance of integrating mental health interventions into HIV prevention and treatment …

Well, not really math, but MATH, for mutant-allele tumor heterogeneity. So not math per se, but a measurement. Allow me to explain.

The measurement known as MATH was created by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital as a way to quantify …

This Thursday I take part in a panel discussion at the Joint ORCID – Dryad Symposium on Research Attribution. Together with Trish Groves (BMJ) and Christine Borgman (UCLA) I will discuss several aspects of attribution. Trish will speak about …

As we return to work this Monday, there’s a good chance that at least some of us celebrated the weekend with a glass of wine or two. Wine has established itself as a drink of choice across the world for …

From March 22nd to March 24th, 2013, a working group of scientists, science writers, and other experts met at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Raleigh, North Carolina to discuss the state of science in the media and how to improve communication between scientists and journalists. Continue reading »

A new service allows researchers to add research datasets – and other content with DataCite DOIs, including all figshare content – to their ORCID profile by integrating with the DataCite Metadata Store. The tool is an adaption (or fork) …

Humans interact with bacteria almost every minute of our lives. Of the millions of these interactions, only a handful result in disease, and some bacteria only cause infections under certain conditions. In a recent PLOS ONE study, researchers probe …

As we have discussed in previous posts, PLOS Biology believes strongly that we are Open for a Reason; one of our key aims is to publish high quality research in areas of importance to ensure that it reaches …

To put it plainly, have we lost our connection with food?

Understanding where food comes from, how it’s produced and where it has been between farm and plate is becoming a rare quality. Almost a novelty. Despite a near-obsession with …