Liza Gross's blog

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.

To mark the appointment of the first Academic Editor-in-Chief for PLoS Biology, there are two editorials published in the journal today: the first is from the staff editors who discuss the background to this appointment, and the second is from the Academic Editor-in-Chief himself, Jonathan Eisen. This is also the perfect moment to introduce Theo Bloom as the new Chief Editor of the journal. Theo has been a key figure in the world of open access publishing for several years – most recently as the Editorial Director of BioMed Central. We’re delighted to welcome Theo and Jonathan to PLoS Biology. Here are a few thoughts from Theo about open access and joining PLoS.

When Temple Grandin argued that animals and autistic savants share cognitive similarities in her best-selling book Animals in Translation (2005), the idea gained steam outside the community of cognitive neuroscientists. Grandin, a professor of animal science whose best-selling books have provided an unprecedented look at the autistic mind, based her proposal on the observation that animals, like autistic humans, sense and respond to stimuli that nonautistic humans usually overlook.

Today marks nearly 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin in 1809, and Darwin Day events around the world aim to celebrate his scientific discoveries and their positive impact on humanity.

PLoS Biology invited Mauro Rebelo, of Instituto de Biofísica Carlos Chagas Filho, and Stevens Rehen, of Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, to describe the "nightmare" facing Brazilian researchers, who can wait as long as two years for Customs to release their research supplies.