Have you ever minimized your Facebook browser window when your supervisor walked past your desk, afraid you might appear unprofessional? Social-networking guilt may soon be a thing of the past as a new breed of social networking sites for scientists clamor to be the next great timesaver in the lab–for you and your supervisor. These science-specific, Web-based networks combine handy library and document-sharing tools with a social twist. Such sites permit scientists to “help out each other with protocols, discuss topics, prepare for scientific meetings, maybe even show off your research a little bit,” says social network user Erika Gyengesi, a neuroscience postdoc at Yale University.
Category Archives: Outlets
Transferring Skills to Tech Transfer
Dermot Leonard’s first experience with technology transfer was as a mechanical and manufacturing engineering student in 2002. He and his teammates at Queen’s University in Belfast, U.K., won £10,000 in a Northern Ireland Science Park competitionfor their business plan to develop and market a self-powered medical pump. The invention never made it to market, Leonard says: The team took a half-hearted stab at marketing their idea–but then they graduated. They spent the rest of the money paying off student loans.
With A Little Help
The walk to and from school can’t be uphill both ways, but going it alone might make it seem that way. When judging the steepness of a hill, people overestimated its angle more when alone than when they were accompanied by—or even thinking about—a friend, reports an international group of researchers led by Simone Schnall of University of Plymouth in England in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in May. The longer the volunteers had been friends with their companions, the less steep the hill seemed.
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Seismic “Noise”–Oil Prospecting Data Could Decipher Ocean Mixing
Three decades ago researchers discovered what are essentially enormous saltwater lakes in the Atlantic Ocean. These “lakes,” called meddies, are gently spinning lenses of water up to 100 kilometers across and one kilometer thick. They float a few hundred meters below the surface of the ocean. Such large, warm bodies, which turned out to come from the Mediterranean Sea, should have an impact on heat exchange in the ocean—and on the planet’s climate. But efforts to study meddies—conventionally by dropping probes that directly measure the ocean’s temperature, salinity and velocity—have proved too costly, infrequent and spread out to reveal how the meddies dissipate their heat. Continue reading Seismic “Noise”–Oil Prospecting Data Could Decipher Ocean Mixing