Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

If you’re a scientist or just a science nut, trying to keep up with the latest in the scientific news and commentary via the internet can be a dizzying task. There are literally tens of thousands of blogs ranging from broad overviews of scientific breakthroughs to in-depth coverage of a specific scientific niche. Here is a list of what is considered to be the top 100 cutting-edge science blogs, arranged by category. General These science blogs offer a little bit of everyting. Science Blog : This blog covers anything and everything science. SciGuy : Eric Berger provides readers with current events and insightful commentary. Open Parachute : This blog takes a look at a number of intriguing science topics. Science Musings : Find out about exciting things happeining in science on this blog. LiveScience : This multiple-author blog covers everything from the environment to the animal world. Scientific Frontline Communication Center : Scientific Frontline has everything from weather to space ...

The Small Business Administration has decided to raise the amount of Small Business Innovation Research program grants in both phases, with Phase I awards increasing from $100,000 to $150,000, and Phase II awards rising from $750,000 to $1 million. In 2008, SBA initially considered making the increases in the grants in order to catch up with inflation. Following a comments period and analysis, the administration has decided to implement the increases. The current award value of $100,000 and $750,000 was originally set in 1992. SBA has the authority to increase the amount of the award every five years. SBA said in an announcement in the Federal Register that adjusting the threshold of awards up to $150,000 and $1 million "adequately offsets the general effects of inflation, maintains a degree of stability and simplicity to the threshold levels, and continues to provide participating agencies with an appropriate degree of flexibility in award size." In determin...

Science jobs from Polyclone Bioservices Pvt. Ltd. Location:Bangalore(India) Designation: Scientist (Bioinformatics) Qualifications: M.Sc/ PhD Experience: 0 – 1 yrs Requirements: • Candidates will have strong knowledge using–and coding functionality that interacts with–public nucleotide and protein sequence databases, sequence alignment software, and related computational genomic resources. • Strong background in sequence analysis, genome annotation, analysis of gene or protein expression, protein structure or docking prediction, comparative genomics is a must. A broad knowledge of statistics and statistical methods used in analyzing genomics data is preferred. Desirable: • C# under the .Net Framework as well as Perl. • Knowledge of the R\Bioconductor programming language • Strong background in multi-univariate and Bayesian statistics, and some experience in machine-learning techniques (SVM, NN). • We welcome expertise in Python, Bioperl, Ruby, Java, C++/C, and Matlab • Understanding o...

At the White House signing this afternoon of an executive order to overturn the previous administration's ban on using human embryonic stem cells in research, US President Barack Obama also signed a memorandum that he said is aimed at insulating science from politics. Obama said today that the Scientific Integrity Presidential Memorandum charges the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with development of "a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making." He said that his administration will "base our public policies on the soundest science …[and] appoint scientific advisors based on their credentials and experience, not their politics or ideology." In addition, Obama said that his administration will be "open and honest with the American people about the science behind our decisions." He also said that promoting science is about more than providing resources, but also involves "ensuring that scientif...

If you offer something of value to people for free while someone else charges a hefty sum of money for the same type of product, one would logically assume that most people would choose the free option. According to new research in the February 20 edition of the journal Science , if the product in question is access to scholarly papers and research, that logic might just be wrong. These findings provide new insight into the nature of scholarly discourse and the future of the open source publication movement. To test this theory, James A. Evans, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and Jacob Reimer, a student of neurobiology also at the University of Chicago, analyzed millions of articles available online, including those from open source publications and those that required payment to access. The results were surprising. On average, when a given publication was made available online after being in print for a year, being published in an open source format ...

Here a very noble thought "Science programs often pretend to be career oriented but they should be knowledge oriented. The main goal should be to teach students how to think and not how to work at a bench. Thus, students who graduate from an undergraduate—or graduate—program will have valuable skills that they can use in any career they choose." Brought out really well in this blog article check it out What will you be? The problem is not that a science undergraduate degree is not a career-oriented degree. It shouldn’t be. History, English, Philosophy, and some of the social sciences aren’t career paths either. But for those fields people seem to know that, and yet people associate science with something that leads to a job. They picture a scientist in a lab somewhere, and don’t realize that the people at the bench are either lab techs with a degree from a technical college or university students or -graduates at some point in their training . It’s all training, it never...

The International Conference in Trends for Scientific Information Professionals Habitual attendees say that "it is the meeting to which they go to spot the trends, as well as the meeting that provides unparalleled opportunities for networking" Trends and networking will be high on the Nice agenda in October 2008. The ICIC meeting covers trends in the field of scientific and professional information with an impressive line-up of significant figures in the information world. Among the topics that will be covered and discussed by the 22+ speakers are: Tools for Competitive Intelligence ( e.g., mining tools, visualisation tools, analysis tools, etc ) Challenges for the information community over the next five years Changes in the information environment for patents, innovation and intellectual property Trends in Search Engines and Information Retrieval ( also see ) Case Studies in Data and Content Integration

It is a chilly Tuesday night and outside the Dana Cafe in London a queue of young people spills on to the pavement. A glamorous woman with a walkie-talkie and clipboard guards the bar's door and turns away anyone who is not on the guest list. The attraction is not the latest band, exclusive club or film screening, but a science lecture। Inside, Aubrey de Grey, a scientist from the Methuselah Foundation, a research group, is swigging from a bottle of Guinness as he tries to persuade a sceptical audience - which includes designers, artists and television producers - how society would benefit if we all lived forever. Clutching a glass of red wine, Alex Wilkie, a 32-year-old design lecturer, believes that science is undergoing a revolution and should not be dismissed as nerdy. 'It's an increasingly scientific society that we live in,' he said. 'Understanding what's going on in science helps put everything in context.' De Grey gives more than 30 such talks a year...

There was a time when bio-science was the Cinderella science: meticulous, certainly, and worthwhile, but far from glamorous. All that changed in 2003, when the sequencing of the human genome was completed. Now masses of data and the potential for radical technologies are attracting the best graduates in chemistry, physics, engineering and maths. And bio-science offers more than intellectual curiosity, explains Professor Sir David Read, Biological Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society. "It's the human factor," he says. "Cross-disciplinary approaches are addressing many of the major threats to humanity: disease prevalence, antibiotic-resistant micro-organisms, avian flu, the threats to the environment associated with climate change." The biological sciences are as varied, and sometimes as confusing, as life itself, taking in such disparate disciplines as neuroscience and taxonomy, environmental science and microbiology, physiology and bioche...

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