Blog Post Of The Month – March 2009

Yes, it’s April 1st, but this is not an April Fool’s joke. This is real. On the first day of every month, as I mentioned earlier, you are invited to visit everyONE to see who has won the Blog Post Of The Month prize.

In the month of March, there were 27 blog posts covering PLoS ONE articles aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org.

Yesterday I spent quite a few hours reading them all. And what fun it was! Frankly, this is the first time I systematically read ONLY the posts aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org and the experience was overwhelming – all the posts are of extremely high quality, suggesting that this service is an excellent filter for the best of what science blogging has to offer.

But such universally high standards also made it difficult for me to pick the winner for this month. Every one of the posts could have won and deservedly so. Then, as I was reaching the end of the list (I was reading them in chronological order), getting a little tired and starting to lose focus, I was blown away by the latest post by Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science (so much so I even e-mailed the link to my Mother):

Ballet postures have become more extreme over time

The blog post, which I hope that you will find time to go and read, as well as a very interesting discussion in the comment thread, describes the research from a recent PLoS ONE article A Dance to the Music of Time: Aesthetically-Relevant Changes in Body Posture in Performing Art, by Elena Daprati of the Dipartimento di Neuroscienze and Centro di Biomedicina Spaziale, Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata and Dipartimento di Fisiologia Neuromotoria, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma, Italy, Marco Iosa of the Dipartimento di Scienze del Movimento Umano e dello Sport, Istituto Universitario di Scienze Motorie, Rome, Italy, and Patrick Haggard of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.

Congratulations both to Ed Yong and to the authors of the article. I have notified the winners and their prizes are on the way. I hope you read Ed’s post and post a comment of your own, and then go to the article itself to read it and post comments there as well.

And for all of you bloggers out there, keep writing – there will be a Prize every month!