A movement is stirring. What's it about?

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

It's called Blog Action Day, a collection of over 6000 blogs world wide that will post about the environment in one go. And I will do my little bit right here on blogSci.

BPR3.org has just put up the three finalists of the logo contest for community voting. We last talked about BPR3 in a post thinking out loud about what such an icon should do. That post also has tons of references about the start of BPR3 and what it stands for.

So come on, get voting!

To help blogSci and other science bloggers interact better with Postgenomic, I wrote a Wordpress plugin, called EasyPG, to quickly add the correct HTML markup used by Postgenomic.

Full details and download at the EasyPG home page. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: science blogging, wordpress, easypg

A blogosphere initiative.

I'm happy to report that I've signed up to the Week of Science initiative from Just Science. What's that? To quote the proposing blog post:

...we would like to propose a Week of Science, to begin on Monday, February 5, and end on Sunday, February 11. During that time each blogger should post about science only, with at least one post per day. Furthermore, issues which are favored by anti-scientific groups (creationism, global warming, etc.) should be either avoided, or discussed without reference to anti-scientific positions.

So what are the topics I'm going to be talking about? I have three ideas; in no particular order:

• What is parental genetic testing? That is, what is the science behind identifying biological parents?
• The science of information retrieval, which is the technical field of how search engines work.
• Epigenetics. An overview and some examples. I'm really looking forward to this one!

Post below with your suggestions, and check out the list of participating blogs.

Technorati Tags: science blogging

New daily brain exercises on blogSci.com

I'm very happy and proud to announce the newest feature on the Blog of Science: the Daily Mental Calisthenics. The Calisthenics are a set of mental exercises to help you keep your brain working. Use them to wake up, have a quick break, and most of all, have fun!

The Calisthenics are made of up of three parts:

• Three words of the day, kindly supplied by The Free Dictionary.
• A Stroop Effect brain teaser.
• An easy game of Sudoku.

The Stroop Effect is seen when the brain is given two conflicting stimuli. The examples the Calisthenics use are words and their colors. If you show someone a word which is a color, such as 'brown' or 'white', then the brain quickly tries to say the word 'brown' or 'white'. Now, suppose you write the word in a different color, say the word 'brown' in red ink. If you now ask someone to say the color the word is written in, the brain gets "confused" and tries to say 'brown' instead of 'red'. Wikipedia has more about the Stroop Effect.

The Calisthenics are truly a daily read: I custom-built them to automatically update for the next 1000 days, with each one being a unique set of games! Bookmark the page, make it your home page, whatever, but rest assured, it'll be there every day for your pleasure!

Again, the link is: Daily Mental Calisthenics. Please post feedback below!

Technorati Tags: mind, brain, exercises, stroop effect, blogsci.com

All part of a blog's evolution.

If you can read this, thank you and congratulations: you are seeing the new and improved Blog of Science. Yes, I moved the hosting of blogSci to make it more reliable and faster.

But that's not all! There is a new design too, which you are seeing now. Hope you like it! And, I've added the article collections, which are themed collections of news posts on blogSci. The first two collections are people in love and human relationships and chocolate. More will be added as major themes emerge.

Of course, I am always available if you have feedback or want to chat about something. You can contact me through another site of mine using this email form or you can leave comments below. Either way, if you want me to email you back, please tell me your email address!

And what holds for blogSci in the future? In the coming few weeks, I'll be adding a major new section for your mental enjoyment

So, thank you dear readers for visiting blogSci. I appreciate it!

Pierre

Blogger uncatergorized

Never thought I would do this, but I moved blogSci back to Wordpress. That makes 2 switches in as many weeks.

Why?

Two reasons really:

• Blogger did not have some features I really couldn’t live without: content categories and custom permalinks
• Wordpress 2.0 was released, promising to end world hunger, cure cancer, and bring 1000 years of world peace. Who am I not to try it?

I’ll be tweaking the design and layout a bit to see if I can beat it into shape…

It’s the blog of science, medicine, technology, and how they all interact with society. What does that mean? It means that anything related to science (especially genetics and medicine) will be talked about. Everything from topical subjects (evolution, antibiotics, bird flu) will be explained in simple terms so that everyone will (hopefully) understand them. It also has sections for other thing that interest me, like technology stuff, webmaster and SEO stuff, and more. And yes, it’s also the home of my personal blog.

More info in the About blogSci page.

I just installed the Blogger Technorati tags user script for Greasemonkey. Let’s see how it fares…

UPDATE: It works very well!