PLoS Blog

Over the past couple of weeks Josh Eveleth and I have answered journalists’ enquiries from many different pockets of the United States about the recently published paper by Majid Ezzati and colleagues. The research, which analyzes mortality data for every county in every US state over four decades, finds a steady increase in mortality inequality across counties between 1983 and 1999.

Médecins Sans Frontières today launches a new website MSF Field Research that will be a tremendous resource for everyone interested in the research that they do as part of their humanitarian work with vulnerable populations.

During the last week of April and the first week of May, PLoS ONE published over 100 papers, with another 57 following today. With such a great range of papers, covering topics from some very noisy bats and the eating habits of Paranthropus boisei, to endangered amphibians and substandard antimalarial drugs, it is perhaps unsurprising that PLoS ONE has recently been featured even more prominently in the news than usual.

Since we launched, the largest number of papers we have published in any discrete topic is Cell Signaling. We are excited that this community is responding to the PLoS ONE publishing model and we want to encourage more submissions! As part of this Call for Papers, we analyzed our Cell Signaling articles to see what is being published at PLoS ONE, and which papers are proving to be the most popular or the most interesting. These results can be read in this post.

Last week, the Chicago Tribune reported, the US Environmental Protection Agency forced the director of its Midwest Office to quit after she refused to let Dow Chemical off the hook for stalling on the cleanup of dioxin-contaminated soil stretching 50 miles from its Midland, Mich., plant. Regional Administrator Mary Gade had ordered Dow to dredge a number of dioxin hotspots over the past year and balked at the company’s attempts to negotiate a more comprehensive cleanup as stalling.