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The Haiti Memory Project is an  oral history project about the January 12, 2010, earthquake and post-earthquake life. The earthquake is a point-zero in the lives of individual Haitians and in Haitian history; it is a moment that divided time into "before" and "after". The project attempts to document that change.

We use data provided by the World Bank to show the main economic indicators of all countries. Each indicator is presented in comparison to several other countries and in terms of changes over time. We discuss the definitions of the various indicators and provide information about the ways in which one can interpret them. See for example, data for the U.S. economic indicators

"It seems like his brain isn't working quite properly and according to new findings, it may not be. Researchers have begun to explore the cognitive impairment that men experience before and after interacting with women. A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even w hen men simply anticipate interacting with a woman who they know very little about. Sanne Nauts ... Daisy Grewal is a researcher at the Stanford School of Medicine, where she investigates how stereotypes affect the careers of women and minority scientists."

The Altmetric Explorer is a powerful, free web app that allows you to track the conversations around scientific articles online. Altmetric collects and analyzes hundreds of thousands of postings about tens of thousands of articles and datasets each month.

"The Niche Audience Problem One of the most basic, most fundamentally wrong, assumptions many nonprofit organizations make is that lots of people should care a lot about their mission. It's just not true, and that's because people have finite attention."

""We wondered how individuals assess the credibility of other people in simple social interactions," said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. "We found a strong correlation between the amygdala and a baseline level of distrust, which may be based on a person's beliefs about the trustworthiness of other people in general, his or her emotional state, and the situation at hand"

Global access to knowledge about life on Earth

"explains how nitric oxide, a signaling molecule involved in the immune system, leads to biofilm formation. "It is estimated that about 80 percent of human pathogens form biofilms during some part of their life cycle," said Scripps Research president and CEO Michael Marletta, PhD, who led the work."

ATLAS is a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The ATLAS detector is searching for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS will learn about the basic forces that have shaped our Universe since the beginning of time and that will determine its fate. Among the possible unknowns are the origin of mass, extra dimensions of space, unification of fundamental forces, and evidence for dark matter candidates in the Universe.

"But, "one has to be cautious. This is exciting science in rodents, but you can't just extrapolate to humans," says Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist and neuroscientist at UCLA's Center for Neurobiology of Stress who was not involved in the new study. Drug and food companies that make probiotics - beneficial bacteria taken in a pill or eaten in food such as yogurt - hope the products can help relieve depression, improve weight loss and cure other conditions, but there is little evidence in people that probiotics can accomplish those goals, Mayer says. "It's almost like science fiction; you can imagine the most amazing things because so little is known about it," he says. But, "So far there's really no evidence that probiotics affect emotions in humans." "

Putting Educational Innovations Into Practice Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education.

"I simply cannot believe that John Cook of Skeptical Science and psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky managed, in just 8 pages, to create something as magnificent as their new Debunking Handbook. It is packed not only with wonderful graphics, but also with a clear explanation of why many attempts to defeat misinformation fail, and what steps must be taken to do a better job. The core issue, of course, is one that I've written much about-too many scientists assume that that facts win out on their own, but that isn't actually true"

"The results are indeed worthy of attention, with Prof Taylor's team finding that in an early stage clinical trial of 11 people who were put on a diet of just 600 calories As written about in Dr Ben Goldacre's latest Bad Science column, producing a pattern from experimental data to come to a conclusion can be a 'magical' experience, but medicine is an 'imperfect art'. "We all know one atom of experience isn't enough to spot a pattern." writes Goldacre, "But when you put lots of experiences together and process that data, you get new knowledge.""

William Gunn The Top 10 papers in Biological Sciences by Mendeley readership. With the Mendeley for Life Scientists webinar coming up on Thursday, I thought I would take a look at the readership stats for Biological Sciences. Biological Sciences has long been our biggest discipline, and having done my doctoral work in the Life Sciences, I knew this would be interesting. Overall, researchers in bioinformatics contributed most strongly to the most read papers, along with the older disciplines of micro- and molecular biology. Regardless of discipline, however, it's clear that the days of toiling away in isolation to thoroughly study one gene are over. Today, it's all about huge consortia and massive data. Here's what I found

"Our knowledge of species and functional composition of the human gut microbiome is rapidly increasing, but it is still based on very few cohorts and little is known about variation across the world. By combining 22 newly sequenced faecal metagenomes of individuals from four countries with previously published data sets, here we identify three robust clusters (referred to as enterotypes hereafter) that are not nation or continent specific. We also confirmed the enterotypes in two published, larger cohorts, indicating that intestinal microbiota variation is generally stratified, not continuous. This indicates further the existence of a limited number of well-balanced host-microbial symbiotic states that might respond differently to diet and drug intake."

The book is about networked science: the use of online tools to transform the way science is done. In the book I make the case that networked science has the potential to dramatically speed up the rate of scientific discovery, not just in one field, but across all of science. Furthermore, it won't just speed up discovery, but will actually amplify our collective intelligence, expanding the range of scientific problems which can be attacked at all. But, as I explain in the book, there are cultural obstacles that are blocking networked science from achieving its full potential. And so the book is also a manifesto, arguing that networked science must be open science if it is to realize its potential. Making the change to open science is a big challenge. In my opinion it's one of the biggest challenges our society faces, one that requires action on many fronts. One of those fronts is to make sure that everyone - including scientists, but also grant agencies, governments, libraries, and, especially, the general public -- understands how important the stakes are, and how urgent is the need for change.

Sciencenet - Towards a global search and share engine for all scientific knowledge. We have developed a prototype distributed scientific search engine technology, "Sciencenet", which facilitates rapid searching over this large data space. By "bringing the search engine to the data" we do not require server farms. This platform also allows users to contribute to the search index and publish their large scale data to support e-Science. Furthermore, a community-driven method guarantees that only scientific content is crawled and presented. Our peer-to-peer approach is sufficiently scalable for the science web without performance or capacity tradeoff.

Service-Component Ensemble Language (SCEL), developed as a multi-layer language for self-aware, autonomic service components (SCs) and service-component ensembles (SCEs) that integrates behavioural description with knowledge representation and reasoning about the environment.

"I am going to try and experiment within an experiment today. I cloned a couple genes from yeast and have been spending months now trying to get them into several vectors for my combinatorial overexpression project. However, as it goes with wet messy biology, this seemingly simple process has been fighting me tooth and nail. I have retrieved one good clone out of 56 minipreps (plasmid construct isolation) and tried several ligations. So I have tripled down this week. In the picture here, I have 32 tubes, each with 5 individual E. coli colonies. That is a grand total of 160 isolates. 1.5 mL of cells have been transferred from overnight cultures and I am about to spin, lyse, and retrieve."

"A Scicurious CV In which Sci can boast about herself. http://scicurious.wordpress.com/ http://scienceblogs.com/neurotopia Professional Honors Semifinalist in the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Prize in Science: Featured in The Open Laboratory: Best Science Blogging 2008 Blogging Anthology. "Uber Coca, by Sigmund Freud" Featured in The Open Laboratory: Best Science Blogging 2009 Blogging Anthology. "Addiction and the Opponent-Process Theory" Nominated for Eureka's Top 30 Science Blogs at the Times Online."