In the news

In line with yesterday’s theme, two articles in the Scientist discuss online opportunities for scientists:
Shouldn’t you be online?
-Editorial addresses restrained adoption of online services by scientists (an issue I raised in my post yesterday.)

Better work through the network
-Using LinkedIn to expand your network.

Take aim…
- This month’s Economist includes a brief overview of the intrinsic difficulties developing cancer therapies.

Nature Releases Scintilla

Nature Publishing Group has created a science aggregator called Scintilla. The goal of Scintilla is to bring personalization to science.

Here’s a description from Nature’s blog Nascent-

Scintilla is an aggregator—of science weblogs, news stories and publication databases—but it works in a slightly different way from the existing online RSS readers that cover the whole internet. For a start, the sources are manually selected, and only related to science, so there shouldn’t be any trouble with spam when searching for stories. Also there’s no ‘unread items’ count, so you don’t have to feel like you have lots of reading to catch up on. Browse the site, add sources to your collection, and visit your ‘Read’ page on Scintilla whenever you’re looking for some juicy science stories to read.

Microsoft Surface

If you haven’t heard of Microsoft Surface, I highly recommend you check it out. It’s amazing technology that could change the way we interact with digital media. It’s not difficult to imagine future applications for this technology beyond it’s current platform and into areas such as medicine and biotechnology.