Rebecca Walton's blog

This week, we were delighted to discover that PLoS ONE had appeared in the New York Times for the sixth week in a row, with an article and part of a podcast on a paper by Iriki and colleagues who trained degus (a type of rodent) to manipulate a rake (“as smoothly and efficiently as croupiers in any Las Vegas casino,” according to the NYT), in their paper, Tool-Use Training in a Species of Rodent: The Emergence of an Optimal Motor Strategy and Functional Understanding.

Last week, Andrew Hyde and I were lucky enough to attend a discussion entitled, “Hold the front page: Science and the embargo," on the role and value of embargoes in science journalism, held by Stempra (The science, technology, engineering and medicine public relations association), an organisation which connects people from across the spectrum of science communication and runs a varied calendar of events.

The end of February saw the publication of a package of papers in PLoS ONE and PLoS Biology describing the findings of a Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UC San Diego research expedition to the remote Line Islands of the Central Pacific. The Academic Editor of the two PLoS ONE articles, Niyaz Ahmed, has posted comments on both papers but here is an extract from his commentary on one of the articles, Baselines and Degradation of Coral Reefs in the Northern Line Islands, and on the package as a whole.

A great example of a PLoS ONE paper, which has benefited from the post-publication features of the TOPAZ publishing platform, is the article, Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia, in which Lee Berger and colleagues describe the fossils of small-bodied humans found in two rock caves on the Micronesian island of Palau.

Continuing the trend for a prominent PLoS press presence (my favourite new tongue-twister), PLoS ONE enjoyed yet another week of great news coverage last week, with four papers generating a large number of news articles and blog posts. It’s been another week of contrasts, from Antarctic fish to Arctic fires, and from memory in moths to cocktail chatter; and this is just a small selection of the 42 papers published last Wednesday. The only surprise was that not many journalists, apart from the Times of India, picked up the paper by Dale et al. in which the researchers used the Wiimote to measure participants’ arm movements in learning tasks.