Weekly PLoS ONE News and Blog Round-up
Here is your digest of the week’s media and blog coverage of some of the papers published in PLoS ONE.
In an article published in PLoS ONE earlier this week, Christopher Stallings of Oregon State University reports on the impact of increasing human populations on the predatory fish communities, which inhabit coral reefs. The study was covered on some of the wires, including the Environmental News Service, you can read a post by the paper’s Academic Editor, John Bruno, on the Climate Shifts blog, as well as a nice blog post on Observations Of A Nerd. Staying underwater, a PLoS ONE article from last month, which reported on the rapid recovery of some coral reefs after sun bleaching, is still picking up media attention, including new posts on the USA Today science blog and the Ecographica blog.
The most recent addition to our Paleontology Collection, the article Scaling of soaring seabirds and implications for flight abilities of giant pterosaurs stirred up discussion on science blogs, including on The Open Source Paleontologist, Observations Of A Nerd and Science. Why Not?. The article Lead Bullet Fragments in Venison from Rifle-Killed Deer: Potential for Human Dietary Exposure was covered by Anne Minard and the Hominin Dental Anthropology blog.
Several other previously published PLoS ONE articles have continued to make the headlines. Scientific American’s 60-Second Science podcast covered both Elena Angulo’s paper on the attractiveness of rare species and an article by Kathryn Breneman and colleagues, which added to our understanding of the role of the ear’s hair cells in hearing. Victoria Arch’s study describing the ultrasonic communication of a Bornean frog, Huia cavitympanum, has now been featured in Nature’s Research Highlights section, as well as by SciCurious of Neurotopia and Anne-Marie Hodge at Endless Forms. Finally, the Ecographica blog has a nice write-up of a recent PLoS ONE paper by researchers at the University of Haifa, Israel, on the extinction of ungulates in the southern Levant during the Holocene period.
As it’s a rather grey day, I made a bee-line for a New Scientist feature, Eight Ways to Boost Your Creativity. Although we don’t have a piano in the PLoS office, many of the pages on the PLoS ONE website are based around a blue colour scheme, which could be good news for our readers who would like to be more creative. One of the other suggestions was to Let Your Mind Wander, which provided some tips for triggering the “Eureka!” moment and an article on the subject published in PLoS ONE, in 2008, by Joydeep Bhattacharya, was highlighted in this section. Then again, as it’s a Friday, the final section of the article might be the most tempting advice to follow!
From the Other PLoS Journals
Reporting in a recent PLoS Biology article, an international team of researchers dsecribe the key structural features of the mimivirus—the largest virus known to scientists—which could further our understanding of the evolution of the simplest forms of life and whether this unusual virus causes any human diseases. Some of the coverage of the study includes Wired Science and Science News.