Worth a Thousand Words

Very, very long time ago, around 500 million years ago, in Cambrian, an unfortunate (for the animals involved, fortunate for science) event occurred in what is today Canada and a large number of animals met an untimely death. Buried in the sediment for all those years, the animals – both the hard and soft parts [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

Did dinosaurs have feathers? More and more fossils are being uncovered suggesting that this is indeed the case. But some fossils are suspected to be hoaxes and others are difficult to study. Not being made of bone, feathers do not preserve well. While there are imprints of feathers around the fossilized skeletons, the feathers are [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

Raw data, statistical analysis, standard forms of graphing the result… sometimes observing these obscures what is really interesting about the information at hand. A clever or novel ways of visualizing data may, on the other hand, uncover phenomena that just jump at us from the image: “Wow! This is interesting!”
In other cases, while statistical [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

Mimoperadectes houdei, a new species of peradectid marsupial formally described by the authors of the new PLoS ONE paper, Cranial Anatomy of the Earliest Marsupials and the Origin of Opossums, is too small to count as megafauna but it certainly is very charismatic. This week’s PLoS ONE featured image is taken from Figure 6 of [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

As we approach PLoS ONE’s third birthday (or, rather, our third second birthday), this week’s featured image comes from a paper published on the day of the journal’s launch, December 20, 2006, Predator Mimicry: Metalmark Moths Mimic Their Jumping Spider Predators, by Jadranka Rota and David L. Wagner.
In their article, Rota and Wagner report a [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

A study by David Rand and Thomas Pfeiffer of Harvard University published in PLoS ONE yesterday reveals how scientific journals’ different publication and review policies can affect the number of citations of published papers. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) offers three different publication tracks [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

This week’s PLoS ONE featured image is taken from a paper published today by Denver Fowler and colleagues at the Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University. In the article, entitled, Predatory Functional Morphology in Raptors: Interdigital Variation in Talon Size Is Related to Prey Restraint and Immobilisation Technique, the authors report that the feet [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2009, unfriend, has prompted much debate online as to whether the chosen word should really have been defriend instead. Either way, both unfriend and defriend are examples of a word’s meaning being changed through the addition of an affix; in this case, unfriend (and defriend) [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

This week’s PLoS ONE featured image is taken from a paper by Michael G. Anderson at Massey University, New Zealand, and colleagues Csaba Moskát, Miklós Bán, Tomáš Grim, Phillip Cassey and Mark E. Hauber. The article is entitled, Egg Eviction Imposes a Recoverable Cost of Virulence in Chicks of a Brood Parasite.
The common cuckoo (Cuculus [...]

Worth a Thousand Webs

We must be approaching Halloween because after last week’s news stories about the discovery of an (almost) herbivorous spider, reported in Current Biology, a new species of spider has now woven its way into the headlines. In their PLoS ONE article published today, Matjaž Kuntner of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

Four years ago (this month actually), I remember watching the first news reports of hurricane Katrina ravaging the Gulf Coast.  Some of the images of the devastating storm I can still recall vividly today.  As years passed, news about the recovery effort in New Orleans dwindled. So I was interested to [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

Many new scientific articles are published every working day in PLoS ONE and immediately become available online—for free. Each paper and all of its content (including any images, related videos and other supporting files) can be freely downloaded, modified, reused and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. No permission from the [...]