Public Library of Science - In the News

Open Access to Health and Human Rights

Gavin Yamey — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:37:23 -0700

Here’s another important step forward in the open access movement. Under its new editor Paul Farmer (who is often talked about as a future Nobel laureate), the international journal Health and Human Rights (HHR) has become fully open access.

The entire contents are freely available and are published under a progressive copyright license that allows readers to reuse the materials for any legal non-commercial purpose.

Farmer and colleagues, in a message from the editors in the “new look” HHR, explain why they are abandoning the previous subscription-based model:

“In embracing the open-access model, HHR aligns itself with a global movement for the democratization of scientific knowledge production and a more equitable distribution of the benefits of science, particularly in health. HHR’s distinctive contribution to this movement will come through the journal’s systematic linking of conceptual and legal human rights analysis with documentation of concrete, front-line experiences translating rights principles into social change and health progress on the ground.”

Online interactivity, which is a natural complement to open access, will be a key feature of the new HHR. In addition to the core articles in the journal, the HHR website also showcases a section of “Perspectives.” The editors describe these as “web-only features, including policy analyses, issue briefs, and advocacy documents, as well as invited opinion pieces and short essays aimed to stimulate debate on health and rights.”

“Over time,” they say, “the website will also provide links, not only to other online journals and information resources, but to emergent spaces in which communities of practice are organizing to strengthen peer-to-peer learning among practitioners in rights-based health program design and service delivery (for example, the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University).”

In the interests of full disclosure, I ought to declare two things.

First, I’m on the editorial board of HHR and have advised the editors on transitioning the journal to open access. They used the terrific Open Journal Systems platform.

Second, the journal has just published a peer-reviewed paper of mine, called “Excluding the poor from accessing biomedical literature: A rights violation that impedes global health.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Through its transition from a subscription-based to an open access journal that publishes materials under the Creative Commons Attribution License, Health and Human Rights joins the knowledge commons movement. The journal now has the opportunity to help catalyze the creation of an online “health and human rights commons” that would be an extremely powerful tool in the worldwide promotion and protection of health as a human right. This commons could, among other things, provide researchers, clinicians, and activists with unfettered access to the data that they need to support their human rights work. It could become a rich public venue for sharing research and policy data, global analysis, discussion and debate, case reports, and experiences from the field.”

HHR has so far posted two responses to my piece, one from Maurice Long of HINARI, who seems deeply upset that I didn’t heap more praise upon the HINARI project (I stated that “HINARI is a step in the right direction,” which is true, but also that it is “a very long way from providing universal open access,” true again). I’ll respond to Maurice’s critique shortly.

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Just Saying No to Drug Reps

Gavin Yamey — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:46:00 -0700

When we launched PLoS Medicine in October 2004, the editors announced that we would “not to be part of the cycle of dependency that has formed between journals and the pharmaceutical industry.”

Medical journals, we argued, had allowed their interests to become aligned with those of the pharmaceutical industry by printing drug ads, publishing trials designed by drug companies' marketing departments, and making profits on reprints used as marketing tools. In contrast PLoS Medicine, we said, “will not accept advertisements for pharmaceutical products or medical devices. Our open-access license allows free distribution of articles, so PLoS cannot benefit from exclusive reprint sales. And we consider as the lowest priority for publication papers that are simply aimed at increasing a drug's market share without obvious benefit to patients.”

By putting a healthy distance between the journal and industry, we were joining a wider movement of physicians who are “just saying no” to the undue influence of drug companies upon medical practice and research. Some of the highest profile organizations in this movement are No Free Lunch (mission statement: “We are health care providers who believe that pharmaceutical promotion should not guide clinical practice”) and Pharmed Out, an independent, publicly funded project that “empowers physicians to identify and counter inappropriate pharmaceutical promotion practices.”

Pharmed Out has just created a “No Drug Reps Certificate” that you can download, print, and display in your office. The language and message are crystal clear:

“This office does not allow visits from pharmaceutical salespeople because we rely on scientific information, not marketing, to decide what treatment is best for you. This policy also means that we don't provide drug samples. "Free" drug samples cost you money. Samples are only available for the most expensive, most-promoted drugs, and are a tactic to get you to use drugs that may not be the best therapy for you.”

There’s space at the bottom for your signature and the date.

Adriane Fugh-Berman, Pharmed Out’s Principal Investigator, says that the certificate has been downloaded more than 1000 times in 10 days. “A physician in Australia,” she says “asked to substitute "taxpayers" for "you" on the certificate, as the government rather than consumers pays for drugs, so we added a version on the site for countries with a national health system.”

The new certificate has been discussed by some of the major pharma blogs (such as Pharmalot and Peter Rost's blog). “Unexpectedly,” says Adriane “several consumers have told us that they are bringing the certificate to their doctors, or, in one case, "flinging it under the door" of medical students.”

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The Birds and the 'Bots

Rebecca Walton — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:50:48 -0700

Some of the topics presented in the news coverage of several papers published in PLoS ONE last week included birds, music and artificial intelligence.

Coen Elemans and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Utah studied the European starling and the zebra finch and found that these songbirds control their songs with the fastest-contracting muscle type yet described. These superfast muscles are previously known only from the sound-producing organs of rattlesnakes, several fish and the ringdove but the new study suggests they may be more common than once thought. The study was covered in the New York Times (Learning From a Muddy Muscle Master), National Geographic (Fastest Known Muscles Found in Songbirds' Throats), The Telegraph (Songbirds have superfast muscles) and The Independent (Songbirds develop super muscles for dawn chorus), among other places.

Birds were also the subject of a study entitled, Birds Reveal their Personality when Singing, by Garamszegi and colleagues. The researchers used bird song as a model to investigate whether behavioural traits involved in sexual advertisement can serve as good indicators of personality in wild animals. They found that the females preferred males who sang close to the ground, which may involve a higher predation risk, because it offers less concealment and puts males in a conspicuous position from the predators’ eye. Only prime quality individuals can cope with such costs of exposed singing, while cheaters will be eliminated by predators. The study was picked up by CBS News (Bold male bird gets the girl: study) and blogged by GrrlScientist (Singing the Praises of Mr Personality).

“Most musical, most melancholy bird,” said Samuel Taylor Coleridge of the nightingale but whether birdsong can affect us in the same way as a beautiful sonata played by a human musician is another matter. Stefan Koelsch at the University of Sussex, meanwhile, investigated whether people respond in the same ways to computerised music – particularly to unexpected chord changes – as they do to music played by humans. The researchers recorded the electrical brain responses and skin conductance responses of the participants and found that while the original, human music elicited brain activity in the listeners and caused them to sweat, the modified music generated little response. The authors suggest that the brain is therefore more likely to look for musical meaning when the music was played by a pianist. Perhaps the computerised music in the study wasn’t quite as poignant as HAL’s rendition of Daisy in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The best headline of the week must surely be The Chronicle of Higher Education for its article on the study: Don't Cry For Me, R2D2. Other coverage included stories in The Telegraph (Sweaty music find could help develop new treatments), The Guardian (Music that brings a tear to the eye), Wired (Study: Computer Musicians Ain't Got No Soul) and PsychCentral (Computer Music Not As Calming).

Finally, a study by Sören Krach and colleagues investigated how the increase of human-likeness of interaction partners modulates the participants’ brain activity. In this study, participants were playing an easy computer game (the prisoners’ dilemma game) against four different game partners: a regular computer notebook, a functionally designed Lego-robot, the anthropomorphic robot BARTHOC Jr. and a human. The fMRI study found that the more human-like the opponent, the more engaged the cortical regions associated with mental state attribution of the participants and the more the participants enjoyed the interaction. The study was blogged by io9 (Proof that the Brain Cannot Distinguish Between Human and Humanoid) and in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Our Brains Attribute Human Qualities to Humanoid Machines).

53 other papers were published in PLoS ONE last week (including an article by Laurie Graham and colleagues, which was covered by The Economist) and can all be read, rated and discussed on the journal website.

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Chewing over the Churnalism: PLoS Medicine in NHS Choices

Andrew Hyde — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:34:21 -0700

“Few things can make a doctor’s heart sink more in a clinic than a patient brandishing a newspaper clipping”, wrote Ben Goldacre in an article in the BMJ last year. (Especially if that clipping is from the Daily Mail, which has acquired such a reputation for dividing the world up into things that either cause or cure cancer that a blog – the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project – is dedicated to keeping a vigilant record).

Journalistic reporting of health studies was evaluated in a recent analysis in PLoS Medicine. Looking at 500 medical news stories that covered treatments, tests, products, and procedures, Gary Schwitzer, Publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, found that most stories failed to adequately address the costs, harms, benefits and the existence of other treatments options. PLoS Medicine's related editorial discussed the many reasons why the results of health studies can be sensationalized in the media, one of which is that press releases issued by medical journals are often prone to hype. In her blog Rebecca Walton made reference to the phenomenon of "churnalism" that can rapidly spread a misleading report or hyped release: increasingly online news sites recycle press releases verbatim and as a consequence “a lot of power lies in the hands of the press officer to shape news coverage.”

What can be done to avoid the cynical dismissal of all attempts by health reporters to explain medical research to public? Ben Goldacre praised the now defunct National Library of Health Hitting the Headlines project to better inform the public and help doctors, who on the basis of the newspaper story may be tempted to just dismiss the research cited by their patients. This has now been been supplanted by the NHS Choices Behind the Headlines service. This site is updated at an impressive rate, analyzing the health stories that break into the national news every day. The site provides a short review of the study that has attracted so much attention, comparing it to the way it is represented by the headlines, before asking what the NHS Knowledge Service can draw from the research.

In the last two weeks two PLoS Medicine papers have featured in NHS Choices Behind the Headlines. One of these was a study by Hans Bisgaard and colleagues which showed an association between mutations in the filaggrin gene (FLG) and ownership of cats with the development of eczema in infancy. The Daily Mail was so concerned about the 8 million cat owners in the United Kingdom that it definitively stated in the headline: “Own a cat and run the risk of eczema.” (This statement rather neatly avoided the fact that if you haven't got the mutation, having a cat is not going to make you more likely to get eczema). Behind the Headlines listed the strengths and limitations of the study, as the authors do in the discussion section of the freely available article. It pointed out that the FLG mutation has only been estimated to account for about 11% of cases of eczema, so the findings will not apply to the majority of people with eczema. (The study was also covered by the Daily Telegraph, BBC News, New Scientist and Nursing in Practice, all with slightly more moderate headlines).

The second PLoS Medicine study recently reviewed on Behind the Headlines was by Rebecca Slater and colleagues. This research suggested that the currently used pain assessment tools may be underestimating the pain response in infants. The Behind the Headlines review looked at the coverage of the study by the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

Another attempt to get behind the headlines is the Australia-based Media Doctor. Like HealthNewsReview.org, it uses evaluation criteria to assess the quality of stories in the Australian press. These ten criteria include whether or not the story in question has relied on the press release. A study recently published in PLoS ONE used the ratings provided by the Media Doctor site and concluded that much of the information the public receives about complementary and alternative medicine is inaccurate or incomplete.

In a 2005 PLoS Medicine debate on the roles and responsibilities of the media in disseminating health information, David Henry and Amanda Wilson of the Media Doctor project said that many journalists have indicated to them that “they are prepared to look critically at their own practices.” And although Gary Schwitzer’s analysis of the quality of reporting of health stories in the media finds the majority to be misleading, HealthNewsReview.org does highlight examples of excellent journalism. Hopefully, these various attempts to evaluate the quality of health reporting in the media can provide cause for reflection by all parties involved in the dissemination of news and information — not just journalists, but medical journals, industry, academic institutions and individual clinicians and researchers.

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Rhapsody in Green

Rebecca Walton — Fri, 4 Jul 2008 08:25:40 -0700

If you have visited the PLoS ONE homepage this week, you may have noticed the rather quirky juxtaposition in the Recently Published block of a paper on the effect of a broccoli-rich diet on prostate gene expression with an article on the acoustic properties of classical and modern violins. Indeed, these two articles generated the most news coverage of the 63 papers published in PLoS ONE on July 2.

In the first of these, entitled, Broccoli Consumption Interacts with GSTM1 to Perturb Oncogenic Signalling Pathways in the Prostate, Richard Mithen and colleagues report the results of a study on changes in gene expression in the prostate gland of volunteers as they participated in a dietary intervention study, involving broccoli-rich or pea-rich diets. The authors are based in Norwich (just up the road from the UK office in Cambridge), and so there were quite a few articles in the UK press (as well as from further afield), ranging from the Norwich Evening News to the BBC News, as well as The Telegraph (Broccoli reduces risk of prostate cancer), The Guardian (Broccoli 'could help fight cancer'), Reuters (Study shows how broccoli fights cancer) and The Age (Broccoli 'reduces risk of prostate cancer'). Mithen was also interviewed about the study by BBC News 24.

The coverage of Berend Stoel’s article, A Comparison of Wood Density between Classical Cremonese and Modern Violins, was no less extensive. Stoel, a researcher at the Leiden University Medical Center, teamed up with an American luthier, Terry Borman, to try to determine why it is that certain classical violins, such as those made by Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri Del Gesu, have set the standards in terms of sound and acoustics, which modern luthiers often try to emulate. The researchers used computed tomography scans to compare five classical violins with eight modern violins. Although the median densities of the modern and the antique violins were similar, the density difference between wood grains of early and late growth was significantly smaller in the classical Cremonese violins compared with modern violins, and the authors suggest this may contribute to the superior sound production of classical Cremonese violins.

Some of the stories on the study have included: BBC News (Wood density key to violin sound), The Telegraph (Secret of Stradivarius violins' superiority uncovered), The Independent (Solved: the mystery of why Stradivarius violins are best), Nature (Acoustics: Fiddling the numbers) and Reuters (Wood density holds key to Stradivarius sweet sound). I am also hopeful that the question “what does a luthier make?” will come up now in the pub quiz some of the Cambridge-based PLoS staff often attend.

Sunny Jun and colleagues at Stanford may have found a way of predicting a woman's chances of becoming pregnant after IVF treatment by assessing an embryo’s quality, as well as recording the woman’s hormone levels; this is reported in an article entitled, Defining Human Embryo Phenotypes by Cohort-Specific Prognostic Factors. “We envision that dissection of human embryo phenotypes and their corresponding molecular correlates is not only a necessary step towards improving the treatment of clinical infertility,” said the corresponding author, Mylene Yao, “but will also contribute significantly to research efforts in the hESC field.” The article was featured in The Guardian (Fertility: Doctors find test to predict chances of IVF success), Time (Predicting In Vitro Success) and Reuters (New method may help predict IVF success: study), and on BBC Radio 4.

Several other papers also enjoyed some media coverage – a paper on the potential benefits of relaxation by Dusek and colleagues was picked up by Newsweek (Train Your Mind, Change Your DNA) and El Mundo (Los genes también 'se relajan'), while French researchers made the front page of Le Monde (En France, les hépatites B et C font entre 4 000 et 5 000 morts par an) and Gratwicke and colleagues were featured in Journal Watch (Extinction in pieces).

Jake Snaddon’s article on children’s perceptions of rainforest biodiversity was featured in Wired, even if the writer, Brandom Keim, described “the study as a well-meaning but hopelessly academic analysis” (not that this is a bad thing)! The Cambridge-based researchers had young children draw pictures of a rainforest, as part of a museum competition, and found that while the children were shown to have a sophisticated understanding of the biodiversity of the rainforest ecosystem, they tended to overemphasise the numbers of charismatic megafauna at the expense of (arguably) “less cute” annelids and social insects, which the authors felt may be a reflection of the number of articles in the news about the plight of mammals, reptiles and birds, as well as the possibility that the children thought they might stand a better chance of winning the competition if they drew more prettier animals.

The other 56 papers published this week are, of course, ready and waiting to be read, rated and discussed online on the PLoS ONE website.

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Going to San Francisco? Finding Flowers for Your Hair May Get Tougher

Rebecca Walton — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:42:44 -0700

Those who follow the advice of Scott McKenzie by wearing flowers in their hair when visiting the Bay Area may find it increasingly difficult to find native Californian flora over the coming years.

Scott Loarie and colleagues discovered that two-thirds of the state's endemic plants could suffer more than an 80 percent reduction in geographic range by the end of the century, thanks to the effects of global climate change. In their study, Climate Change and the Future of California's Endemic Flora, published in PLoS ONE on June 25^th, the researchers warn that because native species not found outside the state make up nearly half of all California's native plants, a changing climate will have a major impact on the state's unparalleled plant diversity. The article prompted an Associated Press story, which has been widely syndicated, along with the following news and blog coverage:

Los Angeles Times – Climate change threatens two-thirds of California's unique plants, study says (see also a beautiful slideshow of images of the flora that could be in danger)
San Francisco Chronicle – Grim look at state's plant life
Reuters – Climate change to create "plant refugees"
Science News – Move It or Lose It
The Great Beyond – Californian plants can’t take the heat

A second article on climate change was published in PLoS ONE this week (Climate Extremes Promote Fatal Co-Infections during Canine Distemper Epidemics in African Lions by first author Linda Munson and senior author Craig Packer). The researchers studied the effects of extreme weather conditions, worsened by global climate change, on the spread of infectious diseases. They found that the increased frequency of droughts and floods expected with global warming, can create conditions in which diseases that are tolerated one at a time may converge and cause mass die-offs of livestock or wildlife as the normal host-pathogen relationships are altered, causing a “perfect storm” of multiple infectious outbreaks that could trigger epidemics with catastrophic mortality. Some of the news coverage of the article includes:

Reuters – Floods and droughts make mild diseases deadly
National Geographic – Major Lion Die-Offs Linked to Climate Change
Discover Magazine – Lion Die-Off Shows How Climate Change Can Cause Epidemics

Finally, in an article entitled, Increased Avian Diversity Is Associated with Lower Incidence of Human West Nile Infection: Observation of the Dilution Effect, John Swaddle and colleagues found an interesting example of how biodiversity can reduce the disease incidence in humans, namely that areas that have a more diverse bird population show much lower incidences of West Nile virus infection in the human population. West Nile develops rapidly in bird populations, and then can be passed to humans or other animals through a vector mechanism, often a mosquito. The article was featured on the Discovery Channel (More Bird Species Means Fewer West Nile Cases) and the blog 10,000 Birds (Bird Biodiversity Good for Humans Too).

You can, of course, read, rate and discuss the other 51 papers published in PLoS ONE on June 25th by visiting the journal publication site.

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The Muted Mating of Female Chimps

Rebecca Walton — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:22:45 -0700

As Niyaz Ahmed, PLoS ONE Section Editor for Microbiology and Genomics, observed on his blog, there were two articles on the behaviour of chimpanzees published in PLoS ONE last week, one of which, Female Chimpanzees Use Copulation Calls Flexibly to Prevent Social Competition, really swept the board of the UK press: there were stories in the Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, which focused on the chimps’ “subtle mating game”, and The Independent, which was intrigued by "the mystery of female sex cries".

Simon Townsend and colleagues at the University of St Andrews studied the calls made by female chimpanzees during mating and found that the females produced louder calls in the presence of high-ranking males but were much quieter when aggressive females were around in order not to alert the competition. The study was also featured in the New York Times (Chimp’s Sex Calls May Reflect Calculation), the BBC News (Monogamy shunned by female chimps), Live Science (Why Female Chimps Shout or Shut Up During Sex), Reuters (Shhhh! Quiet copulation key for female chimps) and BoingBoing (Sounds of chimp sex) and was discussed on the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast.

Once chimpanzees have successfully reproduced, what role do their infant offspring play in the spread of epidemics to the rest of their family? An article by Hjalmar Kuehl and colleagues, entitled, The Price of Play: Self-Organized Infant Mortality Cycles in Chimpanzees, examines play and sociability in young chimps and their effects on the spread of deadly respiratory diseases, and was covered by New Scientist (Frolicking chimp youngsters spread deadly epidemics), Science (Chimpanzees' Terrible Twos) and Science News (Peril of Play) and you can read the comments from Niyaz (who was the Academic Editor of the paper) about the article on the published paper, as well as on his blog (The ‘surfeit’ of chimp articles at PLoS ONE).

It wasn’t just the chimpanzees in the limelight this week, however; three of the other 60 articles published last week also made it into the news.

Ngaire Kerse’s article, Falls, Depression and Antidepressants in Later Life: A Large Primary Care Appraisal, was picked up by The Telegraph (Depression in the elderly increases risk of falls) and by Psych Central (Late Life Depression Linked to Falls). The authors found that older people are at high risk for falls and subsequent injuries and that those with depression have an increased risk of falls and the medications they take for depression increase their risk even more.

Reporting in an article entitled, Sexually Antagonistic Selection in Human Male Homosexuality, Andrea Camperio Ciani and colleagues examined various mathematical models to explain the evolutionary origin and maintenance of male homosexuality in human populations. The model that best explained the data involved two "gay genes," at least one of which on the X chromosome. These genes increased the fertility of women while decreasing it in men, a phenomenon, known as “sexual antagonism,” which has previously been observed in insects and mammals. There have been news articles and blog posts on the study in Science ("Gay Genes" May Be Good for Women), Live Science (Mom's Genetics Could Produce Gay Sons), Discover Magazine (Are Highly Fertile Women More Likely to Have Gay Sons?) and io9 (A Gene That Makes You Really Horny for Men).

Finally, Myra Finkelstein’s paper, Evaluating the Potential Effectiveness of Compensatory Mitigation Strategies for Marine Bycatch, saw the authors studying the problems caused by the huge numbers of fish, seabirds, and other marine animals, which are routinely killed and discarded after being inadvertently caught during fishing operations, and which are known as marine bycatch. The study was covered by the Discovery Channel (Bycatch Fees Won't Help Seabirds) and by Journal Watch (There’s a catch, after all).

In case you’ve already finished reading last week’s release of PLoS ONE articles, we are getting ready to publish our 2,500^th paper on Wednesday and there are plenty more papers available online available for you to read, to rate and to discuss – why not join the conversation today?

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A (Seldom) Flying, Stalking, Creeping, Walking, (Once) Living Pterosaur

Rebecca Walton — Thu, 5 Jun 2008 10:07:45 -0700

After the dinosaur-themed excitement from two weeks ago in PLoS ONE, it is great to return to the late Triassic Period this week to highlight some of the news coverage of a paper published by Mark Witton and Darren Naish, A Reappraisal of Azhdarchid Pterosaur Functional Morphology and Paleoecology. Pterosaur literally means “winged lizard”, while azhdarchid takes its name from a mythological, Uzbek dragon; however, on comparing some azhdarchid fossils with the closest modern analogues – ground-hornbills and storks – the researchers found that azhdarchids are actually highly adapted for terrestrial life and are more likely to be found foraging in diverse environments for small animals and carrion than swooping down on unsuspecting prey from above.

The article generated a lot of buzz in the press and in the blogosphere (including on Naish’s own blog: Terrestrial stalking azhdarchids, the paper), with many of the stories and posts featuring some of Witton’s fabulous illustrations (see Figure 8, for instance, or see his FlickR set for more examples). Here is a round-up of some of the coverage:

News
Scientific American – News Bytes of the Week: Flying dinosaur preferred to hoof it while hunting
New Scientist – Giant pterosaurs stalked baby dinos 'like storks'
National Geographic – Giant Flyers Hunted Dinos on Foot
Live Science – Huge Flying Reptiles Ate Dinosaurs
The Guardian – Fossil prints reveal giant winged reptile was a stalker
The Times Online – Dinosaur experts bring the myth of the pterosaur back down to earth

Blogs
The Great Beyond (Nature News Blog) – Giant flying reptile not much of a flyer
Greg Laden’s blog – Reconsidering the Reconstruction of the Pterosaur
Afarensis – Azhdarchid Fossil Distribution and Taphonomy
Azhdarchid Paleobiology – Azhdarchid Paleobiology, part III
Palaeoblog – Giant Flying Reptiles Preferred To Walk

Another of last week’s articles that created a lot of interest was Jørgen Dissing’s paper, Evidence of Authentic DNA from Danish Viking Age Skeletons Untouched by Humans for 1,000 Years, in which he and his Danish colleagues reported the extraction of authentic DNA from ancient Viking skeletons, avoiding many of the problems of contamination faced by past researchers. Using freshly sampled material from ten Viking skeletons from around AD 1,000, from a non-Christian burial site on the Danish island of Funen, Dissing and colleagues showed that it is indeed possible to retrieve authentic DNA from ancient humans. The paper was Slashdotted and subsequently received several thousand hits within the space of a couple of days. Some of the other coverage (including an article in the Spanish El Mundo, se habla Español) is listed below:

Live Science – DNA Retrieved from 1000-year-old Vikings
Wired – Researchers Recover Thousand-Year-Old Viking DNA
Newsweek – Bring Back the Vikings: Ancient DNA
Discover Magazine – Hide the Women and Children! Researchers Dig up Viking DNA
Scientist Live, UK – Authentic Viking DNA
Huffington Post – Viking DNA Recovered From Ten 1,000-Year-Old Skeletons: Report
Anthropology.net – Recovering 1,000 Year Old Viking mtDNA

Finally, another paper of note from among the 49 published on May 28^th is Brian Fisher and Alex Smith’s A Revision of Malagasy Species of Anochetus Mayr and Odontomachus Latreille (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), PLoS ONE’s first taxonomy paper. The article is a case study involving 1,700 ant specimens from Madagascar demonstrates how a combination of DNA barcoding, traditional morphology, and Web-based tools can help scientists quickly and accurately process large groups of specimens and make the results immediately available so that other researchers can readily incorporate the results into their work. Here are some of the blog posts about the article:

Myrmecos Blog – Fisher and Smith break the PLoS taxonomy barrier
The Other 95% – Ants, DNA Barcoding and Open Access
Deep Sea News – PLoS ONE Get Its "Taxonomy Barrier" Broken
Open Access News – The importance of OA for taxonomy research
Hardin Scholarly Communication News – The Importance of Open Access for Taxonomy Research

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The Patter of Not So Tiny Feet

Rebecca Walton — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:17:01 -0700

Two of the papers published in PLoS ONE this week generated some dinosaur-based headlines, although only one of the studies actually involved any dinosaurs, as anyone who has read the freely-available articles will know.

On Tuesday, PLoS ONE published a study (Resurrection of DNA Function In Vivo from an Extinct Genome) by Andrew Pask and colleagues at the University of Melbourne, in which the researchers inserted genes extracted from Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) samples into mice. The Tasmanian tiger has been extinct since the 1930s and this is the first time that DNA (which was extracted from specimens at Museum Victoria in Melbourne) from an extinct animal has functioned inside a living host. The article received an enormous amount of media coverage both Down Under and further afield, some – although not all – of the journalists picking up on the Jurassic Park associations. You can listen to the authors on NPR’s Science Friday (Extinct Genes Resurrected) and on Voice of America (Australian, US Scientists Bring Extinct Gene Back From Dead) and here is some of the main news and blog coverage of the story:

New Scientist – Tasmanian tiger DNA 'lives' again
Nature – Tasmanian tiger gene lives again
BBC News – Tasmanian tiger DNA 'resurrected'
The Guardian – Extinct animal's DNA reactivated
The Telegraph – Extinct 'tiger' DNA implanted in mouse cells
The Independent – 'Jurassic Park' technique resurrects extinct DNA
The Daily Mail – Extinct Tasmanian tiger could roar back into life after DNA is implanted into a mouse
Live Science – Extinct Tasmanian Tiger's DNA Revived in Mice
Reuters - Extinct Australian Tiger gene functions in mouse
The Australian – Tasmanian tiger lives in a mouse
The Mercury, Australia – Marsupial madness
Wired News – Extinct Tiger Roars in a Mouse
Greg Laden’s Blog – Resurrection of DNA Function from an Extinct Genome
Gene Expression – Tasmanian Tigers are back!
Palaeoblog – Genes From Extinct Tasmanian Tiger Resurrected
io9 – Resurrecting the Extinct Tasmanian Tiger from Preserved DNA
Slashdot – Bits of Tassie Tiger Brought Back from Extinction

As if this wasn’t enough excitement for one week, one of the other 60 papers published in PLoS ONE this week was by Anne Schulp, Mohammed Al-Wosabi and Nancy Stevens and reported the researchers’ discovery of dinosaur trackways in Yemen, which documented a sauropod herd of large and small individuals travelling together. In this kind of study, everyone wants to see what these tracks actually look like and Figure 1 in the article pictured the dinosaur trackways; some bloggers reused the figure in their posts (citing the journal and the authors), which they could do because it was published under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

The study was picked up by the Associated Press (Dinosaur tracks found on Arabian Peninsula), leading to over 150 hits on Google News, at the last count. Other coverage garnered by the paper included the following news stories and blog posts:

Scientific American – Dinosaur Tracks Discovered on Arabian Peninsula
National Geographic – Rare Dinosaur Tracks Found on Arabian Peninsula
Reuters – First dinosaur tracks found in Arabian Peninsula
BBC News – New dinosaur tracks discovered
The Independent – Frozen in time beneath the desert heat: dinosaur footprints
The Daily Mail – Dinosaur tracks discovered in Arabian peninsula
Live Science – First Dinosaur Footprints Found on Arabian Peninsula
The Great Beyond – Dinosaur round up: Yemen, Colorado, Alaska
Afarensis – Dinosaur Tracks from Yemen
io9 – The Great Dinosaur Herds of the Middle East
Palaeoblog – First Dinosaur Trackway From Yemen

Of course, PLoS ONE is still getting plenty of traffic from the last dinosaur paper we published, Paul Sereno’s Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur, which is still being discussed online both on the paper and in the blogosphere.

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County by County Life Expectancy: How Many Americas are There?

Andrew Hyde — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:24:20 -0700

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.

It provoked an intense debate and discussion nationally, but also at a very local level (the local discussions are particularly interesting for someone whose travels in America have not gone much further than visiting the PLoS San Francisco office and whose experience of Vineland is the Thomas Pynchon novel rather than the New Jersey counties covered by the Vineland Daily Journal).

For example, by making the supporting datasets (and figures and video files) that demonstrate the changes in life expectancy county by county freely available in PLoS Medicine, the Roanoke Times was able to report statistics for Pulaski and Radford counties in Virginia. (An alarming finding from the study – as the New Scientist reported – is that there has been a decline in life expectancy in some of the poorest sections of the population, primarily among women in the Southern States). On a national level, the paper was on the cover of the New York Times Week in Review with former Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee John Edwards commenting that the findings demonstrate how "the wealth and income disparity effectively infiltrates all parts of people’s lives." Edwards was asked to comment because of his national campaign to end poverty in America by 2036.

Worth listening to are the interviews on NPR's Science Friday show and the shorter broadcast on Voice of America. As Ezzati makes clear in both of them, on average life expectancy has risen for American men and women since the 1960s, but is from the 1980s that the troubling geographical disparities have worsened and some counties have experienced stagnation and even a decline. This kind of worsening of life expectancy for segments of the population is not something usually associated with developed high-income countries - in the Voice of America interview, Ezzati observes it that this worsening is something that happened after the fall of the Soviet Union when the health and social networks in Eastern Europe collapsed.

In an online interview with the Washington Post Ezzati fields questions and theories about the trends from readers in the West and the East of the country, from San Francisco, California to Eastern Shore, Maryland. He illustrates the point that this worsening of life expectancy is a phenomenon occurring in the United States and not Europe by referring to the Human Mortality Database. This is a project set up by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, to provide historical mortality data for many countries.

The Economist and the Wall Street Journal (which embedded one of our video files in the blog to complement the story) focused on the impact that diseases linked to smoking or obesity, such as lung cancer and diabetes, have had on life expectancy. ABC News quoted Ezzati to demonstrate that these negative trends have affected women particularly: "one out of five American women have had their health either getting worse or at best not getting better."

The study is a troubling but fascinating reminder of how huge the United States is and how wide the disparities within it are. Whilst John Edwards spoke of "two Americas" in the 2004 Presidential election campaign, a 2005 PLoS Medicine paper by Majid Ezzati and colleagues established "eight Americas" in terms of mortality disparities across race and counties. In the Voice of America interview, Ezzati says he hopes the new study raises awareness about health care in America and prompts monitoring of those being left behind in order to understand what kind of policies and interventions can reverse the decline in life expectancy.

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