Happy New Year

Happy New Year! yes, it has been a while since I've posted. On the plus side, I did finish a manuscript. Yay me:) On the negative side, I have done precious little writing on my dissertation. My resolution this year is to write much more. What inspired me to post again? Finding out that my blog pops up at the top of the list for hadrosaur chewing. Apparently people do read this after all:)

Ok, on to stuff people might be interested in. Lots of stuff has come out recently. A couple of new dinosaurs recently, a new Gondwanan dromeosaur named Austroraptor cabazai, by Novas and crew in Proc. Roy. Soc. B, and Albertonykus borealis, in Cret. Res. by Longrich and Currie. While the dinos are cool and all, I wish people would stop overhyping their stuff or vastly over-reaching their data. While Austroraptor is interesting, I would hardly call it "bizarre", but that's just me. I also think Longrich and Currie went rather far beyond what we know about the animals and their ecosystems in their interpretations. Indeed, it is my personal opinion that a few of the statements in the paper went beyond what we can know, which I think is something we as scientists really need to be wary of. No disrespect meant to them, because I hold great respect for all the authors of these papers. Hell, Currie is in my top five most respectable and influential paleontologists and has deserved every bit of praise he has been given. But I think we need to be very wary of making statements that go beyond what we can really demonstrate. Sadly, the game is played these days such that doing so is very hard to do and still get your material published and noticed. But for the good of us all, it is a goal we must strive for.

Moving on, I must say that the dino paper I am most excited about is a paper that has gotten a good bit of press by Witmer and Ridgely on the paranasal sinuses of predatory and armored dinosaurs in the Anatomical Record, vol. 291. The most exciting part about the paper for me is the crazy straw nasal passage seen in Euoplocephalus. It is truly freaky, never seen anything like it before and opens up a lot of possibilities in physiology that seriously need to be addressed. I highly recommend this paper. If you want to see more of the data, Witmer has a bunch of 3D files on his website at http://www.oucom.ohiou.edu/dbms-witmer/Euoplocephalus_movies.htm. Oh, and they also have a chapter in the book by Currie et al. on Pachyrhinosaurus which is neat too, but not nearly as scientifically interesting to me.

Ok, enough about dinosaurs. You should really check out NewScientist.com. They have a great article on virtual dissection. I so want one of those CT scanners with dual x-ray sources. That sort of machine would make my work much easier. The images they show are truly fascinating. There is also an article on the wierdest animals of the year, including a one ton rodent and a frog that breaks its bones to produce claws that then cut through its own skin. Definitely worthy of being on the list. I also found the sea slug that absorbs functioning chlorophyll from the algae it eats allowing it to gain energy from photosynthesis. Funny thing about that, I wrote a story fragment years ago about genetic research allowing people to photosynthesize. In my story, it worked, except for the problem that the people still ate like normal because that is what their bodies were designed to do, which caused them to die of gross obesity. Apparently, the sea slugs are smarter than that.

Finally, I would like to bring to people's attention an article published in PLOS Medicine by Young et al. called "Why current publication practices may distort science." It does a good job of laying out several problems in science publication practices today and offers some suggestions for improving them. He nicely discusses the "winner's curse" problem in which the winner of an auction pays more than the item is worth. In this case, he makes an analogy with this to the problem in science that the more extreme and positive the results, the more likely it is to be published and cited. Results that are less significant or negative have a much harder time getting published, even though they are more often valid. It also causes "herding", in which the more cited papers can actually drive other researchers into similar avenues of research. this is basically the academic version of trendsetting. What works for one serves as the bandwagon others jump on, and which allows their papers to be published more easily. This however, means that avenues of research are then limited by what has been published before and can inhibit innovative research. This is a topic that everyone who uses scientific data should be cognizant of, as everyone has a stake in the data being published, whether they realize it or not. As just one example, the medicine we take is based on positive published results, but we don't know how many negative studies have gone unreported. Think about that next time you pop a pill for an ailment.