Rebecca Walton's blog

The Nutcracker’s Eats – and More Recent PLoS ONE News Coverage

Rebecca Walton — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:33:09 -0700

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.

Below follows a short summary of the news and blog coverage of some of the articles that received the most coverage. As always, you can add your own thoughts by posting Comments and Notes directly onto the articles themselves.

In a paper described by the Academic Editor, Peter Soyer, as “an exciting manuscript on a cutting edge technology,” Yair Granot and colleagues at UC Berkeley and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem used cell phone technology to provide a potential solution to the deficiency of medical imaging in underserved areas. Around three quarters of the world’s population is without access to medical imaging and by combining a hand-held scanner with a cell phone, the authors sought to solve this problem. The story was covered in Live Science (Real Trekkie Tricorder Invented) and Pravda (New Technology Allows Sending Medical Images via Cell Phones), as well as a number of business and technology publications, such as Business Week (Medical Advances—Through Your iPhone?) and What PC? (Boffins send medical images via mobiles).

It might seem that the guy sitting opposite you on the train ride home, who won’t stop yakking on his cell phone, has a pretty loud voice – not compared to the bats studied by Annemarie Surlykke at the University of Southern Denmark. These bats can cry at up to 140 dB – 20 dB above the human pain threshold. The study was picked up by New Scientist (Bat squeaks louder than a rock concert), Live Science (Bats Screech Louder Than Rock Concerts), Physics Today (Noisy bats break decibel levels) and The Naked Scientists (Bats out of hell: it's official, bats are louder than a Meatloaf concert), as well as the blogs Pondering Pikaia (For crying out loud...) and Hearing (The Echolocation Baton Is Intense).

From aural overload, to the oral cavity: Peter Ungar and colleagues conducted a quantitative analysis of dental microwear for Paranthropus boisei. The morphology of this hominin's teeth suggested that the so-called “Nutcracker Man” ate hard, brittle foods like nuts and seeds, but in this study, the researchers found that while P. boisei was capable of eating harder foods, it generally did not do so. The study was covered by Scientific American (Nutcracker Man Preferred Soft Fruits and in the 60-Second Science podcast), The Economist (Gnashers at work), Science, Live Science (Tough Early Human Loved Fruit) and Wired News (The Counterintuitive Evolutionary Lesson of the Nutcracker Man) and there are some great blog posts on the paper too, including one by PLoS ONE editorial board member John Hawks (Average diet versus extreme diet in robust australopithecines) and another by Laelaps (Robust australopithecines and masticatory overkill).

The following week, PLoS ONE published another study involving the face; in this article, Anthony Little and colleagues studied symmetry and sexual dimorphism. Participants had to rate the masculinity or femininity of very symmetric and very asymmetric photos of Europeans, the Hadza – hunter-gatherers from Tanzania – and macaque monkeys. They found that the most symmetric male faces were judged to be most masculine and the most symmetric female faces were judged to be the most feminine, regardless of whether the photo depicted a European, a Hadza or a macaque, adding support to the theory that sexual dimorphism and symmetry in faces are signals advertising gene quality. The story was featured in The Telegraph (Why beauty is an advert for good genes), NHS Choices (Facial symmetry and gender perception), The Times of India ('Beautiful people are healthier'), Anthropology.net (The sexiness of facial symmetry across cultures and species) and on Mind Hacks (Male body symmetry, more female orgasms), although the female orgasms to which the title of the refers are actually part of a separate study.

In a study described by Nicola Jones on the Nature News blog as “grim,” Patrick O. McGowan and colleagues at McGill studied the epigenetic changes in the brains of men who had committed suicide and who had a history of childhood abuse or severe neglect, compared to controls who had normal upbringings but died in sudden accidents. The article received a great deal of news coverage, including in New Scientist (Abuse may trigger gene changes found in suicide victims), The Economist (Silencing of the lambs), The Telegraph (Evidence child abuse may 'mark' genes in brain), Newsweek (How Child Abuse Gets Into the Brain) and The Toronto Star (DNA may hold clue to suicide, study says). You can also read – and join – some of the discussions that are already taking place on the article.

The following five PLoS ONE papers have also been in the news recently:

Antimalarial Drug Quality in the Most Severely Malarious Parts of Africa – A Six Country Study (Bate et al.)
New York Times – Fake Malaria Drugs Emerging in Vulnerable Countries in Africa
The Times (UK) – A third of malaria drugs in Africa are ineffective
Reuters – Study finds Africans get substandard malaria drugs

The Herbicide Atrazine Activates Endocrine Gene Networks via Non-Steroidal NR5A Nuclear Receptors in Fish and Mammalian Cells (Suzawa et al.)
NPR’s Science Friday – Weedkiller Worries

Hung Out to Dry: Choice of Priority Ecoregions for Conserving Threatened Neotropical Anurans Depends on Life-History Traits (Loyola et al.)
Washington Post – 'Ark' Designed to Save Imperiled Amphibians
The study was covered widely in Brazil, including in O Estado de São Paulo, Folha de São Paulo, G1, and Ciência Hoje.
See also a blog post by Rafael Loyola, the corresponding author – Our paper in PLoS ONE has been just published

The Druze: A Population Genetic Refugium of the Near East (Shlush et al.)
MSNBC – Druze people are living 'gene sanctuary
Reuters – Gene trawl shows Druze are living "gene sanctuary"
Archeology News Report – Genetics Confirm Oral Traditions of Druze in Israel

Seed Dispersal and Establishment of Endangered Plants on Oceanic Islands: The Janzen-Connell Model, and the Use of Ecological Analogues (Hansen et al.)
Journal Watch – The ghost at the feast
Wildlife Extra – Seed dispersal in Mauritius – dead as a dodo?

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Raking It In

Rebecca Walton — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 11:11:16 -0700

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.

The paper, published last week, was also covered by AFP (and was widely syndicated) and in the ScienceBlog Neurophilosophy (Rats can learn to use tools). The authors say these findings suggest that tool use is not a specific faculty resulting from higher intelligence but results from a combination of more general cognitive abilities; my hope, conversely, is that degus can be trained to cook the dinner as well as sweep the floor – they probably couldn’t do a worse job than me.

Another PLoS ONE paper published last week (Differences in Muscle Protein Synthesis and Anabolic Signaling in the Postabsorptive State and in Response to Food in 65–80 Year Old Men and Women by Michael Rennie) did rather well in the UK press, Rennie being based at the University of Nottingham. The study examined the decreasing ability of post-menopausal women to store protein as muscle, compared to men of the same age who do not undergo this change. The story was covered in the following publications (it’s nice to see the journal represented in women’s magazines, like Marie Claire, too!);

BBC News - A diet high in protein could help older women stay fit
The Daily Telegraph – Ageing women face uphill battle to keep fit
The Daily Mail - Why women find it tougher to keep in shape as they grow older
Marie Claire - Age old problem
MSN India - Wanna stay young at 50?

In a paper whose news coverage may have been helped by the stories about the riots in Tibet, Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson studied 16 long-term Buddhist meditators and found that the practice of meditation can improve the ability of meditators to concentrate and can help them to become more compassionate towards family and loved ones. The study participants were given the following instructions from Matthieu Ricard, an interpreter for the Dalai Lama:

“During the training session, the subject will think about someone he cares about, such as his parents, sibling or beloved, and will let his mind be invaded by a feeling of altruistic love (wishing well-being) or of compassion (wishing freedom from suffering) toward these persons. After some training the subject will generate such feeling toward all beings and without thinking specifically about someone. While in the scanner, the subject will try to generate this state of loving kindness and compassion.”

The two reviewers, Antonio Damasio (who described the paper as, “a well-executed study, on a rather off-beat topic”) and Perrine Ruby, were both impressed too and you can read their comments on the paper, which is entitled Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise.

Some of the news coverage of this paper included:

Scientific American – Meditate on This: You Can Learn to Be More Compassionate and the podcast, Learn to Be Kind
Newsweek – The Lotus and the Synapse
Live Science – How the Dalai Lama Keeps His Cool
CTV – Meditation can lead to greater compassion: study
The Age, Australia - Change of mind, change of heart
Channel 4 News (UK) – 'Meditation can make brains kinder'
The Times, South Africa – Everyone can learn to be compassionate — study

Another 33 papers were published in PLoS ONE on March 26^th and a further 47 were published this week; as ever, these papers are all freely available online and can be discussed and rated online.

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IHM - Health Blogs, Part 4

from Trusted.MD Network on Mon, 2008-05-12 23:46

From Bulldog Reporter: "Inside Health Media’s huge new blog directory gives PR pros an inside guide to influential bloggers covering health, medicine and fitness."

If you are one of the following bloggers who might be checking out your incoming links,

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Break It

Rebecca Walton — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 06:41:55 -0700

Last week, Andrew Hyde and I were lucky enough to attend a discussion 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 discussion was entitled, “Hold the front page: Science and the embargo,” and posed the following questions:

Science journalism is often governed by embargoes, a "gentlemen's agreement" that dictates when a story can be reported. But what is their purpose? Do they make for better science reporting or are they just a tool for journals and press officers to manipulate the media with? When is a story just too good to keep the embargo and should the public interest come first?

The panel consisted of journalists Robin McKie (The Observer) and Steve Connor (The Independent), and from the other side of the fence, Katrina Nevin-Ridley (Head of Media at the Wellcome Trust) and Tony Kirby (from the Lancet press office), and while no one was wholly in favour of abandoning embargoes altogether, there was a great deal of high-quality discussion and debate on the matter.

"Time," said Robin McKie on Tuesday night, "is God's way of preventing everything happening at once." Embargoes, on the other hand, are journals' and press officers' way of ensuring everything happens at the same time (most of the time, anyway – Today, after all, waits for no man). Katrina Nevin-Ridley talked about the new considerations brought about by the constantly rolling tickers of a society in which 24-hour news is the norm, especially with sites like Google News that allow readers to watch the big stories as they break and spread, almost in real time. This is a model that suits the daily newspapers best and tends to afflict the Sundays the most, hence their bad rep when it comes to breaking embargoes.

So, are embargoes respected? The panel seemed to think so - given the number of papers press released, breaks are pleasingly rare. However, sometimes journalists do "forget" the embargo time or find that the dog somehow ate their global clock and - oops! - now their story is online. As Craig Brierley from the Wellcome Trust pointed out, press officers aren't going to stop pitching stories to newspapers and radio shows just because they have broken embargoes in the past and a certain degree of self-policing takes place. Nevin-Ridley noted that although embargoes are just a gentleman's agreement, not everyone is a gentleman. An explanation for the break (if it's a decent one) and an apology and promises for better behaviour in the future are generally enough. Journalists could, of course, go for the big exclusive every day but this position is unlikely to be tenable for long and such rogue hacks will find embargoed information increasingly hard to come by.

But do embargoes serve the public's interest? Various audience members highlighted the problem of “churnalism” whereby increasing numbers of news stories consist of little more than recycled copy from press releases and the news wires (see also David Bauder’s Associated Press story on this subject yesterday); these stories are then read by thousands or even millions of people. This means that a lot of power lies in the hands of the press officer to shape news coverage. The panel agreed that, on balance, embargoes are in the best interests of the public because, as Connor pointed out, they give journalists the time to prepare a more measured, thoughtful and analytical article on a complex topic. They also allow press officers to ensure that the busy authors of the papers are available for interview during a certain block of time prior to publication. Maybe the resulting stories won't be ten times better than if they had to be churned out as soon as possible after the paper is published and maybe embargoes are just a form of news management in which institutions, funders and journals compete to get the best coverage. However, Connor suggested that, on balance, embargoes definitely do benefit the public but that the rules and regulations they impose are perhaps best broken in very exceptional circumstances.

Of course, when it comes to public interest and the dissemination of scientific research, the ability to immediately read – without charge – the original study behind the news coverage is of great importance. It's easy to tempt lazy journalists, in need of a story, right now, to simply tweak a press release slightly to turn it into a news article. The availability of the research article, free and online, puts the power back in the hands of the readers so that they can see for themselves what the research actually involved and what conclusions can and can't be drawn from it. Papers published in PLoS's open-access journals are embargoed until 5 p.m. Pacific Time on the day before the paper is published – the approximate time the article is available online – for this reason.

The linguist Roger Lass said (on explaining language change, although the point is still valid here), "There may well be areas in which second-best is best, because first-best is simply not possible in principle." Perhaps the use of embargoes in science communication is only second-best but in the absence of a better system, it certainly does a pretty good job. Even if embargoes are occasionally broken, the system itself ain't broke just yet.

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Guest Blog: Intriguing Realities of Coral Reef Degradation and the New Baselines for Conservation

Rebecca Walton — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:17:22 -0700

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:

Imagine a medical microbiologist mutating into a coral-reef ecologist! This came true when I was recently handling two interlinked manuscripts at PLoS ONE (1, 2) and following an extremely exhaustive and rigorous peer-review, more so than I have ever seen, I myself became deeply interested in the field of coral reef ecology!

It is now two weeks since these articles were published and an overwhelming interest of the community is already evident from many evaluations and blog posts apart from wide media coverage that these articles have elicited. Beyond this, I thought an 'outsider's perspective' on the 'PLoS coral reef package' is really needed. I am sure such a perspective as this will catalyze start of a discussion involving also the non-experts apart from the coral community members.

In the current scenario of colossal public attention to environmental problems and far-reaching consequences of related studies published in open-access journals, the science of coral reef ecology seems to have stratified into two major paradigms: A) coral reef degradation is the outcome of direct human impacts such as overfishing and development and conservation efforts therefore, should focus on these aspects and B) decline of corals is largely the result of global climate change and microbial 'pathogens' and conservation resources should focus on these issues. Obviously these are the two extremes which need to be balanced. The ‘PLoS coral-reef package’ [comprising of the paper of Sandin and colleagues (1) published together with another article in PLoS ONE (2) and an essay at PLoS Biology (3)] indeed denotes that the much-needed balancing act has just started.

The authors convey (1, 3) that coral reefs in remote areas with less human inhabitation support thriving of more fishes and commonly have healthier and bountiful corals than reefs in more populated areas. They suggest that local protection of reef trophic structure may be critical in their conservation (1). However, they also warn of the poor understanding that prevails about the natural reef trophic structure and community organization. Moreover, because the present day reefs are so deranged and altered, studying them to understand natural reef function may be like studying cattle ranches in the tropics to understand function of the tropical forests that were long replaced by the ranches.

1) Sandin SA, Smith JE, DeMartini EE, Dinsdale EA, Donner SD, et al. (2008) Baselines and Degradation of Coral Reefs in the Northern Line Islands. PLoS ONE 3(2): e1548. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001548

2) Dinsdale EA, Pantos O, Smriga S, Edwards RA, Angly F, et al. (2008) Microbial Ecology of Four Coral Atolls in the Northern Line Islands. PLoS ONE 3(2): e1584. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001584

3) Knowlton N, Jackson JBC (2008) Shifting Baselines, Local Impacts, and Global Change on Coral Reefs. PLoS Biol 6(2): e54 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060054

You can read the rest of Niyaz's post here and you can post your own reactions and comments directly on the Sandin paper and on the Dinsdale paper by creating an account on the PLoS ONE website. Why not contribute to the discussion today?

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Small People, Big Deal

Rebecca Walton — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:40:08 -0700

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.

The Academic Editor of the paper, John Hawks, has already posted an excellent FAQ on his blog outlining his comments on the paper and his involvement with the paper. There is also a link to this post in the discussion section of the paper itself and here is a brief passage from the interesting and informative post:

In the case of this manuscript, I think it was a good fit to PLoS ONE because of the potential to report the new finds in an open access forum, where anyone can read the original research. It is not a monograph on the archaeology or skeletal biology of the sites, it is merely a preliminary report. However, unlike the kind of preliminary reports that we often see in journals like Nature or Science, in this case the journal provided more space for description and the potential to provide long lists of specimens. Many of those additional details were added to the manuscript in response to my editorial comments. If you read the reviewer reports for the paper (available at PLoS ONE), you can see that these additional details were essential to the scientific value of the manuscript, and that is why I required them. In addition, I suggested many other changes that would increase the value of the manuscript. The final version reflects the authors' responses to these changes: a preliminary report on the skeletal remains, in context, given the limitations presented by preservation and the need to conserve and prepare additional specimens.

As Dr Hawks mentions, you can also read comments from both of the referees who reviewed the paper. Referee #1’s review is available here and referee #2, Robert B. Eckhardt, wrote a longer commentary detailing his thoughts on the paper and its context, which is available in full here. To whet your appetite, here is a short extract:

[Rather than what it is not, though,] We should begin with what the paper by Berger, et al., is; their own words serve just fine in this regard: “We feel that the most parsimonious, and most reasonable, interpretation of the human fossil assemblage from Palau is that they derive from a small-bodied population of H. sapiens (representing either rapid insular dwarfism or a small-bodied colonizing population), and that the primitive traits that they possess reflect either pliotropic [sic] or epigenetic correlates of developmental programs for small body size.” Much of the rest of their paper describes the geographic and temporal settings, plus some detailed, professionally competent, morphological descriptions of the Palau skeletal material. There is no need to repeat those descriptions here, but they are well worth reading, and re-reading.

The paper also received extensive coverage in the media and in the blogosphere, with many of the stories including links to the original paper so that readers could check out the study behind the media buzz for themselves – particularly important in the case of a solid paper that also provoked a lot of debate and discussion.

In the news (a small sample of the full coverage):
New York Times - Discovery Challenges Finding of a Separate Human Species
National Geographic - Ancient Bones of Small Humans Discovered in Palau
New Scientist - New bones suggest 'hobbits' were modern pygmies
BBC News - Island find stirs Hobbit debate
The Independent - Skull may identify tiny islanders who shrank to survive
The Guardian - Pygmy human remains found on rock islands
Science - Hobbit Redux?
Reuters - Tiny Palau skeletons suggest "hobbits" were dwarfs
Independent Online, South Africa - Discovery fuels 'hobbit' debate and Fossil find ruins romantic getaway

Podcasts:
NPR’s Science Friday - A New Species, or Just Small Humans? (March 14; including an excellent interview with the author)
The Guardian – Science Weekly podcast (March 17)

Blogs:
Wired News - Were Fossil 'Hobbits' Just Little Humans? and Finding Common Ground in the Hobbit Controversy
Slashdot - Ancient Bones of Small Humans Discovered In Palau
Anthropology.net – 3,000 year old small body humans in Palau, Micronesia
Science Notes – Small variety of humans found in Micronesia
Afarensis – Small Bodied Humans From Palau
Pondering Pikaia - Small Humans Discovered in Palau
MetaFilter – Not Hobbits, Just Shorties?

Finally, I was very amused by an article on the UK-based Daily Mash, Tiny Island People Were Ewoks, Not Hobbits, Say Scientists, which seemed particularly funny given the tendency to immediately jump on the hobbit train when it comes to these papers and that it’s entirely conceivable that some readers may not have noticed the crucial difference between this story and some of those listed above.

You can read Berger’s freely available article on the PLoS ONE site and join the conversation, yourself!

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Fire, Ice and Another Week of PLoS ONE News Headlines

Rebecca Walton — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:48:32 -0700

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.

Hamish Campbell and colleagues at the University of Birmingham studied a species of Antarctic fish, Notothenia coriiceps, that effectively goes into hibernation during those long, Antarctic winters. This is unusual, as fish aren’t normally able to suppress their metabolic rate independently of water temperature whereas Campbell and his fellow researchers found that the metabolic rates of these Antarctic fish were lowered in winter despite the fact that the water temperature didn’t decrease very much. The study was published in an article entitled Hibernation in an Antarctic Fish: On Ice for Winter and led to the following news articles and posts (and not a single mention of Captain Birdseye among them!):

BBC News - Antarctic fish's winter 'sleep'
The Daily Telegraph - Fish that hibernates in freezing Antarctic water
National Geographic - Antarctic Fish "Hibernate" in Winter
The Daily Mirror - Scientists find hibernating fish in Antarctic
Wired News - Researchers Find a Hibernating Fish
Reuters - Scientists find hibernating fish in Antarctic

On the top of the world, meanwhile, was the study of fires in the tundra of the Arctic by Philip Higuera at Montana State University. The paper, Frequent Fires in Ancient Shrub Tundra: Implications of Paleorecords for Arctic Environmental Change, evoked some very Frostian imagery and captured the attention of the following news publications and blogs:

New Scientist - Global warming may raise tundra wildfire risk
Science Daily - Warming Climate May Cause Arctic Tundra To Burn
Bloomberg - Arctic Tundra May Burn as Global Warming Increases Shrub Cover
Journal Watch Online – Baked Alaska

From under the sea and over the land to up in the skies, Douglas Blackiston and colleagues at Georgetown University examined whether moths and butterflies can remember their experiences as a caterpillar. They found that caterpillars that received an electric shock in association with a specific odour still showed aversion to the same odour as adults. The paper, Retention of Memory through Metamorphosis: Can a Moth Remember What It Learned As a Caterpillar? was covered in the following articles and blog posts, among others:

New Scientist - Butterflies remember caterpillar experiences
National Geographic - Moths Remember Lessons Learned While Caterpillars
Science - Shocked Moth Remembers Past Life as Caterpillar!
Philadelphia Inquirer - Could it be the butterfly that never forgets?
People’s Daily Online, China - Do butterflies remember being caterpillars?
ABC Science Online - Moths remember life as caterpillar
Science Daily - Can Moths Or Butterflies Remember What They Learned As Caterpillars?
Not Exactly Rocket Science - Moths remember what they learn as caterpillars
Wired News - Butterflies Remember What They Learned as Caterpillars
World Science - Butterflies may keep memories of caterpillar youth

Finally, if you have ever wondered how it is you are able to hear and understand the person to whom you are talking at a busy, noisy party, look no further than Holger Schulze’s paper, Auditory Cortical Contrast Enhancing by Global Winner-Take-All Inhibitory Interactions. Schulze and colleagues looked at this phenomenon, known as the cocktail-party-problem, which we are able to overcome thanks to the ability of the human auditory system to decompose the acoustic world into discrete objects of perception; these insights may well help to improve the experience of wearers of hearing aids at cocktail parties. The Daily Telegraph (Brain trick opens possibilities for smart hearing aids) and Reuters (Pitch is key to cocktail party conversation: study) each wrote an article about the study too.

As always, all of these articles - and everything else we publish - are freely available to read in full and can be rated, annotated and discussed on the PLoS ONE website.

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Life Is a Lot Like Jazz... It's Best When You Improvise

Rebecca Walton — Mon, 3 Mar 2008 11:51:24 -0800

PLoS Medicine’s domination of the UK (and worldwide) media last week was always going to be a hard act to follow but a number of the papers published in PLoS ONE this week did rather well in the news and in the blogosphere. From coral to quarrels and from improv to instinct, as usual, PLoS ONE has published some great papers in a wide range of different fields.

On Tuesday, a day earlier than usual in order to coordinate the publication with an accompanying essay published in PLoS Biology, PLoS ONE published a pair of research articles reporting the findings of a Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UC San Diego research expedition to the remote Line Islands of the Central Pacific. Dinsdale and colleagues describe a novel aspect of the microbial communities in the coral reefs while Sala and colleagues document the ecology of a still relatively pristine coral reef, from the smallest to the largest organisms, and describe the effect of slowly increasing human interactions. You can also read a summary by Niyaz Ahmed, the academic editor of the two research articles. Here’s a round-up of some of the coverage of the papers:

New York Times - Coral Reefs and What Ruins Them and Before They Vanish (a slideshow of gorgeous images). The story was also featured in Front Page podcast on Tuesday.
San Francisco Chronicle - Coral reefs without human intervention found to be healthier
San Diego Union Tribune - Studies show scope of damage to reefs
Environmental Research Web - Scripps expedition provides new baseline for coral reef conservation

The following day, we published another brace of 47 papers, several of which have been covered in the news; clearly, it’s hard just to pick one when there are so many interesting articles to read!

Morten Kringelbach’s paper, A Specific and Rapid Neural Signature for Parental Instinct, was featured in a number of news articles and blogs. The authors show that a certain region of the human brain is activated in response to (unfamiliar) infant faces but not to adult faces, suggesting there is a neural basis for the parental instinct.

Reuters - Study sheds light on parental instinct
Canadian Press - You've got the cutest little baby face: Brain activity linked to parental instinct
The Telegraph - Babies faces 'make us want to care for them'
The Discovery Channel - Adult Brains Wired to Go Ga-Ga Over Babies
Cognitive Daily - We respond differently to babies' faces within 150 milliseconds
World Science - Brain workings linked to parental instinct

In their paper Bats Use Magnetite to Detect the Earth's Magnetic Field, Richard Holland and colleagues showed that bats use a magnetic substance in their body called magnetite as an ‘internal compass’ to help them navigate; amazingly, no one used the term “bat-nav” in any of the stories I read – perhaps the journalists suffered the same sensation of l’esprit d’escalier as I did or perhaps they just had better taste in headlines.

The Times of India - Magnetism helps animals navigate
Channel 4 News – Bats have 'internal compass'
Cordis News, Belgium - Study sheds new light on bats' animal magnetism
Pondering Pikaia – The Magnetite Maps of Microchiropterans

The Grove Dictionary of Music has described the act of improvisation as “The art of thinking and performing music simultaneously” and, indeed, we are still hoping for some more media mileage from an interesting study by Charles Limb, in a field I like to call ‘neuro-jazz’ (see also our neuro-art paper from last November), in which the authors investigate the neuroscience of jazz improvisation. There have been a lot of excellent blog posts about the paper, Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation, including the following:

Wired News - Creativity Explored, by Mapping Jazz Musicians' Brains
Mind Hacks – The Metaphysics of a Jazz Thing
Neurophilosophy - The neuroscience of jazz improvisation
Not Exactly Rocket Science - What happens in the brain of an improvising jazz musician?
PsychCentral – Jazz “Improv” Turns-On Creativity
The Rehearsal Studio - Science Messes with Jazz (Again?)
Science A Gogo - This Is Your Brain on Jazz
Smooth Pebbles - How Jazz Players Get into the Zone
MedGadget - This Is Your Brain on Jazz

Back in Blighty, Katherine Buchanan and colleagues at Cardiff University studied the effect of pollutants on bird song. The paper, Pollutants Increase Song Complexity and the Volume of the Brain Area HVC in a Songbird, was picked up twice by the Daily Mail (Let's hear the music, as the Pill makes starlings hit the high notes and Singing starlings and why thousands of babies who should have been boys are being born as girls) and appeared in the New York Times (Polluted Worms Help Starling’s Song, but Not Mating Fitness) and the Science Times podcast.

Finally, there have been some stirrings of activity Down Under on Blair Patullo’s paper on fighting crayfish, too: Yabbies hold a grudge, Don't ever fight a yabby and Crayfish fight club; you can probably guess by now which headline I liked the best.

Struth! It’s really been a bonza week at PLoS ONE, and, of course, there will another posse of papers available on Wednesday, freely available online, as always.

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New and Exciting in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology [A Blog Aroun

from Biology on Mon, 2008-03-03 18:51

Last week's crop of PLoS ONE articles enjoyed quite a nice buzz in the media and on the blogs. But

New and Exciting in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology

from A Blog Around The Clock on Mon, 2008-03-03 18:07

Last week's crop of PLoS ONE articles enjoyed quite a nice buzz in the media and on the blogs. But today is a new week, and we start, as always with new articles in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology -...

Broiler Chicken Welfare Definitely Isn’t Pukka

Rebecca Walton — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:39:34 -0800

If you kept your television tuned to BBC One after the England-Switzerland football match on Wednesday night, you might have caught a feature on the Ten O’Clock News about a paper published in last week’s PLoS ONE (although the Beeb didn’t think to mention the journal). Nonetheless, we were impressed that the story was second only to the coverage of some voting I hear is going on in a faraway land…

In a paper entitled Leg Disorders in Broiler Chickens: Prevalence, Risk Factors and Prevention, Toby Knowles and his colleagues at the University of Bristol, the University of Warwick and The Royal Veterinary College, report that the huge increase in growth rates of broiler chickens means more than a quarter of these intensively-reared birds have difficulty walking and suffer from poor leg health.

Coincidentally, the paper was published the day after British supermarket giant, Tesco, announced it was to start selling super-cheap (groan) whole chickens for as little as £1.99 ($4). This is despite efforts from celebrity chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver (presenters of the Channel 4 TV shows Hugh’s Chicken Run and Jamie’s Fowl Dinners, respectively, Oliver also infamous for his use of the word pukka) to raise awareness of the terrible living conditions broiler chickens must endure, compared to their free-range counterparts.

In an article in The Daily Telegraph, Knowles said: "The welfare implications of this study are profound. Worldwide approximately 20 billion broilers are reared within similar husbandry systems that are biased towards economics of production and detrimental to poultry welfare."

In The Guardian, meanwhile, Dr Lesley Lambert, director of research at Compassion in World Farming, worries that consumers will vote with their wallets rather than with their consciences: "Why doesn't Tesco drop their prices on their higher welfare products and make this affordable to people on all budgets? While Sainsbury's has committed to massive improvements in animal welfare, Tesco is showing its ethical credentials with this race to the bottom.”

Matthew Fort, food writer at The Guardian, wrote a thought-provoking opinion piece for The Guardian’s Comment is Free section, which has triggered an eggstra-feisty debate.

Other news coverage of the story included:
The Independent - Tesco hits a new low with arrival of the £1.99 chicken and Janet Street-Porter: Hooray for Henry? Not bloody likely...
BBC News – Anger over £1.99 Tesco chickens
Metro - Tesco attacked for selling £1.99 whole chickens
Daily Mail - TV chef's fury as Tesco sells its chickens for just £1.99
Channel 4 News – Chicken cost falls despite TV campaign
Wired - Farmed Chickens Can't Walk; Just Grow Them in Vats Already
Independent Online, South Africa – 'Cramped, fat and crippled'

Effect Measure went one better and posed every schoolboy’s favourite question, Why can't the chicken cross the road?

Don’t be a chicken now: Knowles’s article is freely available in full, so why not read the paper yourself and add any comments or notes you may have?

That’s quite enough chicken jokes, although if your pun-tolerance is higher than mine, ChickenJoke.com has a longer list of variations on a theme and Google has many, many more, if you are eggstremely bored.

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Bartering Chimps and Banqueting Mice

Rebecca Walton — Tue, 5 Feb 2008 07:45:10 -0800

Last week saw the publication of PLoS ONE’s 1,500^th paper since our launch in December 2006, although there was no time for a celebration, sadly, as we were too busy with the 39 papers that were published on January 30, no less than four of which enjoyed considerable media attention, and which covered a broad range of subjects, from bartering chimps to banqueting mice and from carbon dating to cocaine addiction.

In order to further our understanding of the evolution of bartering, Sarah Brosnan (a member of the PLoS ONE Editorial Board) and her colleagues studied the circumstances under which chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, would exchange a lower-value food item (like an apple slice) for one valued more highly (like a grape). The article was covered by The Daily Telegraph, Wired and Live Science and is being discussed online at Economist’s View and at the Free Exchange blog at Economist.com. You can, as always, join in the discussion by posting your comments and notes directly onto the online version of Brosnan’s paper.

Chimps’ diet also played a role in a study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Somel and colleagues compared mice whose diet consisted of raw fruit and vegetables (comparable to that of a chimp) to those that were fed human diet (they either shared the cafeteria food eaten by the researchers or were treated to fast food from the local McDonald’s). These dietary changes resulted in thousands of gene expression differences in the livers of the two groups of mice, although no such differences were found in their brains. The paper was picked up by Newsweek and Wired, as well as The Daily Mirror, who grabbed the low-hanging fruit offered by the Big Mac mice with open arms. People who write press release titles shouldn’t really throw stones, though.

Moving from the liver to the eye, Danish scientists led by Niels Lynnerup have been able to predict the year of a person’s birth to a high degree of accuracy, by subjecting small, transparent proteins (crystallins) from the lens to radiocarbon dating techniques, or as the IANS put it, Forgot her birthday? Look deep into her eyes! The Times of London and Afarensis also covered the article. No more lying about your age, then. Read the paper for the full story.

Finally, a study by Anna Rose Childress (another new recruit to the PLoS ONE Editorial Board) used fMRI scans to investigate the mechanisms behind drug addiction. Childress and colleagues found that cocaine-related images activate the emotional centres of the brains of patients addicted to drugs – even if the subjects don’t realise they have seen anything. The researchers hope that the findings can be used to improve treatment strategies of drug-addicted patients. The paper was featured in the Baltimore Sun. Parla italiano? If so, you may want to read this article in the Italian, online news site, Altro Giornale. There is also a fascinating HBO video, part of a 2007 documentary Addiction, in which you can watch Dr Childress discussing the study and talking to some patients she studied.

Of course, this is just a small subset of the papers published in last week’s PLoS ONE. You can browse the other 35 on our website. Check back tomorrow for the next cohort!

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