Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome by Ted J. Kaptchuk et al., had over 265 articles written on the paper. Some of that media coverage came from: The New York Times, TIME, NPR and Bloomberg.

The paper, Experimental ‘Jet Lag’ Inhibits Adult Neurogenesis and Produces Long-Term Cognitive Deficits in Female Hamsters, received media coverage from: Science 2.0, Time, The Globe and Mail, The Times of India, The Daily Mail, The Mercury News and AFP.

Key Steps in Developing a Cognitive Vaccine against Traumatic Flashbacks: Visuospatial Tetris versus Verbal Pub Quiz by Emily A Holmes et al., received media attention from: CNN, New Scientist, Not Exactly Rocket Science, LA Times, TIME, Network World, ABC News and PC Magazine.

Cannibalism in Tyrannosaurus rex by Nicholas R. Longrich, John R. Horner, Gregory M. Erickson and Philip J. Currie was covered by: CNN, Times of India, CTV, Herald Sun, Science Blog, Sify, LA Times, National Geographic, Bloomberg, The Guardian, AOLs, io9, Discovery News, Dinosaur Tracking, Into Oblivion and New Scientist.

Viewing Pictures of a Romantic Partner Reduces Experimental Pain: Involvement of Neural Reward Systems by Jarred Younger and colleagues, received coverage from: USA Today, TIME, CNN, Scientific American Observations, LA Times, Seattle PI, AOL News, Hindustan Times, BBC, The Press Association, WebMD, Scope, Visit Bulgaria, Disease of the Week, The Guardian and The MedGuru.

Iridovirus and Microsporidian Linked to Honey Bee Colony Decline received coverage from: PBS NewsHour, New York Times, The Telegraph, The Baltimore Sun, TIME, The New Yorker, New Scientist, Discover (blog), NPR, Science Blogs, CBS, Ars Technica, and Popular Science.

Scott Sampson and colleagues recently published their paper on two new horned dinosaurs found in southern Utah.  They received coverage from: CNN, The Guardian, National Geographic, Sify, RedOrbit, ABC 4, ScienceBlog, BBC , AFP, Mongabay, and Christian Science Monitor.

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s manuscript, Social Network Sensors for Early Detection of Contagious Outbreaks received coverage from: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Los Angeles Times, MIT Technology Review, KPBS, Wired, Business Week and Science Now.

Homocysteine-Lowering by B Vitamins Slows the Rate of Accelerated Brain Atrophy in Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Randomized Controlled Trial by David Smith et al., received worldwide coverage – with over 300 articles written on the paper. Some of the media outlets that covered the story included: CNN, BBC, Aljazeera, Xinhua, Time(blog), Times of India, Tehran Times, The Guardian, CTV, Seattle Times, Bloomberg, Los Angeles Times, The Telegraph and Reuters.

Fruit and Soil Quality of Organic and Conventional Strawberry Agroecosystems by John P. Reganold et al., was covered by Scientific American, USA Today, Technocrati, LA Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and Science Friday.

Our PLoS ONE: Marine Biodiversity and Biogeography – Regional Comparisons of Global Issues collection which also received worldwide media attention.

A Sinister Bias for Calling Fouls in Soccer by Alexander Kranjec et al., during the month of the World Cup, was a big hit with the media. It was covered by C6-H12-O6, Dormivigilia, Duncan Hull, Research-digest blog, New York Times, Telegraph, U.S. News & World Report and a number of other places in many languages.

Quantifying the Performance of Individual Players in a Team Activity by Duch et al., was covered by Washington Post, National Geographic, Chicago Sun-Times, Forbes and MSNBC.

Choosing Organic Pesticides over Synthetic Pesticides May Not Effectively Mitigate Environmental Risk in Soybeans by Bahlai et al., was covered at CBC, GuelphNow, Alberta Express, Nutritional Blogma, Sify news, Phased and Journal Watch Online.

First Direct Evidence of Chalcolithic Footwear from the Near Eastern Highlands by Pinhasi et al., received widespread coverage and it is impossible to collect all of the hundreds of links to all the articles and blog posts, so here is a more-or-less representative sample: Scientific American, National Geographic, Discovery News, Discover – 80beats, The Great Beyond, CNN and Huffington Post.

The article An Environment-Wide Association Study (EWAS) on Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Patel et al., was covered in Diabetes.co.uk, Health Newstrack, The Money Times and San Jose Mercury News.

Ancient Nursery Area for the Extinct Giant Shark Megalodon from the Miocene of Panama by Pimiento, Ehret, MacFadden and Hubbell, was covered at Laelaps, Discovery News, Not Exactly Rocket Science and Toronto Sun.

First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality by Slater et al., was covered by ScienceNews, LiveScience, Discovery News, CBS News and New Scientist.

Bee Threat Elicits Alarm Call in African Elephants by King et al., was covered in Science NOW, Wired, TreeHugger, BBC, Disney Parks blog, Thaindian News and Vancouver Sun.

Raltegravir Is a Potent Inhibitor of XMRV, a Virus Implicated in Prostate Cancer and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by Singh et al., was covered by Virology blog, Scientific American blog, Salt Lake Tribune and Xinhua.

Laetoli Footprints Preserve Earliest Direct Evidence of Human-Like Bipedal Biomechanics by Raichlen et al. was reported at Washington Post, Scientific American blog, BusinessWeek, Laelaps and Wired Science.

The Alzheimer’s Disease-Associated Amyloid β-Protein Is an Antimicrobial Peptide by Soscia et al, was covered by New York Times Health Feed, Business Week, Suite101, Scientist Live, Alzheimer’s Reading Room and Neurophilosophy.

The article Optimal Waist-to-Hip Ratios in Women Activate Neural Reward Centers in Men by Steven M. Platek and Devendra Singh was irresistible to the media. It was covered widely, some outlets included Herald Sun, Times of India, Telegraph, New York Daily News and ZME Science.

The article Analysis of the Putative Remains of a European Patron Saint–St. Birgitta received coverage from: Register, Gene Expression, Monsters and Critics, A Very Remote Period Indeed and ScienceBlog.

The Extent of the Preserved Feathers on the Four-Winged Dinosaur Microraptor gui under Ultraviolet Light by David Hone et al., was covered by The Open Source Paleontologist, Dinochick Blogs, Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking and Dracovenator.

Images from top to bottom: PLoS ONE e15267,  e13706, e12948, e11871, e10984, e10564, e9769 and e8986

….Hannah Waters of the Culturing Science blog (with the subtitle “biology as relevant to us earthly beings”), for her post Forest canopy height: why do we care?, describing the research in the PLoS ONE aticle Recent Widespread Tree Growth Decline Despite Increasing Atmospheric CO2 by Lucas C. R. Silva, Madhur Anand and Mark D. Leithead of the Global Ecological Change Laboratory in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. From the Abstract of the paper:

Background

The synergetic effects of recent rising atmospheric CO2 and temperature are expected to favor tree growth in boreal and temperate forests. However, recent dendrochronological studies have shown site-specific unprecedented growth enhancements or declines. The question of whether either of these trends is caused by changes in the atmosphere remains unanswered because dendrochronology alone has not been able to clarify the physiological basis of such trends.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Here we combined standard dendrochronological methods with carbon isotopic analysis to investigate whether atmospheric changes enhanced water use efficiency (WUE) and growth of two deciduous and two coniferous tree species along a 9° latitudinal gradient across temperate and boreal forests in Ontario, Canada. Our results show that although trees have had around 53% increases in WUE over the past century, growth decline (measured as a decrease in basal area increment – BAI) has been the prevalent response in recent decades irrespective of species identity and latitude. Since the 1950s, tree BAI was predominantly negatively correlated with warmer climates and/or positively correlated with precipitation, suggesting warming induced water stress. However, where growth declines were not explained by climate, WUE and BAI were linearly and positively correlated, showing that declines are not always attributable to warming induced stress and additional stressors may exist.

Conclusions

Our results show an unexpected widespread tree growth decline in temperate and boreal forests due to warming induced stress but are also suggestive of additional stressors. Rising atmospheric CO2 levels during the past century resulted in consistent increases in water use efficiency, but this did not prevent growth decline. These findings challenge current predictions of increasing terrestrial carbon stocks under climate change scenarios.

In her blog post, Hannah says:

Lasers are cool! The LIDAR technology, originally created for studying atmospheric chemistry, reapplied to study canopy heights has allowed us to visualize our forests in a new way. (And make some beautiful pictures.) There was a lot of work put into it – and to accurately measure how our forests are changing, increasing work will have to be done to keep the maps updated to create an index of canopy height on our planet.

However, we’ve also learned that we cannot necessarily rely on traditional hypotheses in times of climate change. While trees have the capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it, other factors can confound these effects, as we read in the PLoS ONE paper. While more work certainly needs to be done on this front (using large-scale climate measures for growth instead of dendrochronology, for example), their results are certainly sobering.

I am about to notify both Hannah and the authors of the article and send them the famous PLoS ONE t-shirts as prizes. This month’s runners-up are: EcoPhysioMichelle, for blogging not one but three PLoS ONE articles last month (one, two, three), Neurosceptic (two posts – one, two), and the trio of bloggers – Kevin Zelnio, Razib Khan and Dave Munger – for discussing one of the PLoS ONE articles in their weekly podcast.

Previous winners:

March 2009: Ed Yong
April 2009: Eric Michael Johnson
May 2009: Christie Wilcox
June 2009: Iddo Friedberg
July 2009: Toaster Sunshine and Hermitage
August 2009: Bjoern Brembs
September 2009: Alun Salt
October 2009: Andrew Farke
November 2009: John Beetham
December 2009: SciCurious
January 2010: Anne-Marie Hodge
February 2010: Princess Ojiaku
March 2010: Grrrlscientist
April 2010: Jason Goldman
May 2010: Brian Switek
June 2010: Greg Laden

There were 30 blog posts covering PLoS ONE articles aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org in May. As usual, a number of posts were excellent so it took me a lot of time and effort to narrow down the field and finally choose just one. So, drumroll, please….

…the winner for this month is Brian Switek of Laelaps. His post, Off the prehistoric coast of Panama, a mega-toothed shark nursery describes the work in the PLoS ONE article Ancient Nursery Area for the Extinct Giant Shark Megalodon from the Miocene of Panama by Catalina Pimiento, Dana J. Ehret, Bruce J. MacFadden and Gordon Hubbell. From the Abstract:

Background

As we know from modern species, nursery areas are essential shark habitats for vulnerable young. Nurseries are typically highly productive, shallow-water habitats that are characterized by the presence of juveniles and neonates. It has been suggested that in these areas, sharks can find ample food resources and protection from predators. Based on the fossil record, we know that the extinct Carcharocles megalodon was the biggest shark that ever lived. Previous proposed paleo-nursery areas for this species were based on the anecdotal presence of juvenile fossil teeth accompanied by fossil marine mammals. We now present the first definitive evidence of ancient nurseries for C. megalodon from the late Miocene of Panama, about 10 million years ago.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We collected and measured fossil shark teeth of C. megalodon, within the highly productive, shallow marine Gatun Formation from the Miocene of Panama. Surprisingly, and in contrast to other fossil accumulations, the majority of the teeth from Gatun are very small. Here we compare the tooth sizes from the Gatun with specimens from different, but analogous localities. In addition we calculate the total length of the individuals found in Gatun. These comparisons and estimates suggest that the small size of Gatun’s C. megalodon is neither related to a small population of this species nor the tooth position within the jaw. Thus, the individuals from Gatun were mostly juveniles and neonates, with estimated body lengths between 2 and 10.5 meters.

Conclusions/Significance

We propose that the Miocene Gatun Formation represents the first documented paleo-nursery area for C. megalodon from the Neotropics, and one of the few recorded in the fossil record for an extinct selachian. We therefore show that sharks have used nursery areas at least for 10 millions of years as an adaptive strategy during their life histories.

Brian writes:

My early elementary reading school choices often got me into trouble. Every week I would pass over the recommended, grade-appropriate sections for the few shelves containing the books about dinosaurs, sharks, and alligators – if it was big and hard sharp teeth, I wanted to learn about it. The school librarian was not too pleased with this, even calling my parents in on one occasion to insist that I read something fit for younger children, but I just could not get enough of theropods, crocodylians, and enormous sharks.

Given my love for “cold-blooded killers” (as so many titles described them) it was not very long before I learned about “Megalodon” (formally known as Carcharocles megalodon), an immense shark which disappeared just a million-and-a-half years before human bathers began to wade into the shallows. Perhaps, some books hinted, the giant sharks still lurked in some unknown ocean recess, and a photograph of an array of American Museum of Natural History scientists inside the restored jaws of the shark drove home the point that it could have made of meal of just about anything it wanted. It was one of the most fascinating and terrifying images I had ever seen…

And there Brian jumps into the fascinating science of this paper!

I am about to notify both Brian and the authors of the article and send them the famous PLoS ONE t-shirts as prizes. This month’s runners-up are Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology, Daemios from Rudimenthos and Neuroskeptic of the Neuroskeptic blog.

Previous winners:

March 2009: Ed Yong
April 2009: Eric Michael Johnson
May 2009: Christie Wilcox
June 2009: Iddo Friedberg
July 2009: Toaster Sunshine and Hermitage
August 2009: Bjoern Brembs
September 2009: Alun Salt
October 2009: Andrew Farke
November 2009: John Beetham
December 2009: SciCurious
January 2010: Anne-Marie Hodge
February 2010: Princess Ojiaku
March 2010: Grrrlscientist
April 2010: Jason Goldman

There were 31 blog posts covering PLoS ONE articles aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org in March. And they were excellent. It took me a lot of time to choose. But I had to pick only one, and I chose….drumroll….

This month’s winner is GrrrlScientist of Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) blog, for her post UV, You See? Black Light Reveals Secrets in Fossils covering the article by David W. E. Hone, Helmut Tischlinger, Xing Xu and Fucheng Zhang The Extent of the Preserved Feathers on the Four-Winged Dinosaur Microraptor gui under Ultraviolet Light. GrrrlScientist wrote:

Even though the findings reported in this paper provide a nice opportunity to show you lots of detailed photographs of Microraptor gui, the take-home message is about what UV illumination means in regards to fossil preservation and preparation. There is a lot of hidden information waiting to be uncovered in many fossils, even long after they’ve come to light, and this information can be accessed by using a variety of techniques, such as UV light illumination.

Unfortunately, scientists miss all kinds of rare and valuable soft-tissue information by not using all of the techniques available to them, often because they are unaware of them. If paleontologists and fossil preparators are unaware of the variety of hidden information that a fossil might contain, they risk destroying it during preparation. Already, at least one museum now regularly prepares fossil material with UV light (as already has happened with one famous fossil, Juravenator, for example).

The article’s Abstract is:

Background

The holotype of the theropod non-avian dinosaur Microraptor gui from the Early Cretaceous of China shows extensive preservation of feathers in a halo around the body and with flight feathers associated with both the fore and hindlimbs. It has been questioned as to whether or not the feathers did extend into the halo to reach the body, or had disassociated and moved before preservation. This taxon has important implications for the origin of flight in birds and the possibility of a four-winged gliding phase.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Examination of the specimen under ultraviolet light reveals that these feathers actually reach the body of the animal and were not disassociated from the bones. Instead they may have been chemically altered by the body tissues of the animal meaning that they did not carbonise close into the animal or more likely were covered by other decaying tissue, though evidence of their presence remains.

Conclusions/Significance

These UV images show that the feathers preserved on the slab are genuinely associated with the skeleton and that their arrangement and orientation is likely correct. The methods used here to reveal hidden features of the specimen may be applicable to other specimens from the fossil beds of Liaoning that produced Microraptor.

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

The runners-up this month were Brian Mossop, Zen Faulkes and Brian Switek.

Previous winners:

March 2009: Ed Yong
April 2009: Eric Michael Johnson
May 2009: Christie Wilcox
June 2009: Iddo Friedberg
July 2009: Toaster Sunshine and Hermitage
August 2009: Bjoern Brembs
September 2009: Alun Salt
October 2009: Andrew Farke
November 2009: John Beetham
December 2009: SciCurious
January 2010: Anne-Marie Hodge
February 2010: Princess Ojiaku

There were 18 blog posts covering PLoS ONE articles aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org in November. And the one that caught my attention was How Raptor Talons Fit Their Prey by John Beetham from the DC Birding Blog. John writes:

The first thing to understand is that raptors do not usually kill their prey by wounding them with their talons or beaks. Instead, most raptors kill their prey by constriction – squeezing their prey so tightly that death comes by asphyxiation. In a minority of cases, this squeezing motion may cause fatal injury if a talon pierces a vital organ. In other cases, a raptor may start dismembering and eating its prey before the prey is fully dead.

———————

Given the prominent role that a raptor’s feet play in seizing prey, it makes sense that the shape of their feet might vary with how a raptor uses them. This is in fact the result reached by a team of graduate students after they photographed and measured the feet of hundreds of bird specimens, both raptors and non-raptors.

The post describes, and puts into context for avid birders, the PLoS ONE article Predatory Functional Morphology in Raptors: Interdigital Variation in Talon Size Is Related to Prey Restraint and Immobilisation Technique by Denver W. Fowler, Elizabeth A. Freedman and John B. Scannella of Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University:

Abstract: Despite the ubiquity of raptors in terrestrial ecosystems, many aspects of their predatory behaviour remain poorly understood. Surprisingly little is known about the morphology of raptor talons and how they are employed during feeding behaviour. Talon size variation among digits can be used to distinguish families of raptors and is related to different techniques of prey restraint and immobilisation. The hypertrophied talons on digits (D) I and II in Accipitridae have evolved primarily to restrain large struggling prey while they are immobilised by dismemberment. Falconidae have only modest talons on each digit and only slightly enlarged D-I and II. For immobilisation, Falconini rely more strongly on strike impact and breaking the necks of their prey, having evolved a ‘tooth’ on the beak to aid in doing so. Pandionidae have enlarged, highly recurved talons on each digit, an adaptation for piscivory, convergently seen to a lesser extent in fishing eagles. Strigiformes bear enlarged talons with comparatively low curvature on each digit, part of a suite of adaptations to increase constriction efficiency by maximising grip strength, indicative of specialisation on small prey. Restraint and immobilisation strategy change as prey increase in size. Small prey are restrained by containment within the foot and immobilised by constriction and beak attacks. Large prey are restrained by pinning under the bodyweight of the raptor, maintaining grip with the talons, and immobilised by dismemberment (Accipitridae), or severing the spinal cord (Falconini). Within all raptors, physical attributes of the feet trade off against each other to attain great strength, but it is the variable means by which this is achieved that distinguishes them ecologically. Our findings show that interdigital talon morphology varies consistently among raptor families, and that this is directly correlative with variation in their typical prey capture and restraint strategy.

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

This month, the winner is Andrew Farke of The Open Source Paleontologist blog. In his post, A Happy Family of Pachycephalosaurus, Andrew writes:

Distinguishing the skulls of juveniles and adults of the same species, and sometimes different species, can be a prickly thing in the fossil record. The result is that paleontology is littered with juvenile fossils that have been considered adults at some time or another.

————-

Yesterday in the open access journal PLoS ONE, paleontologists Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin published a long-awaited paper positing synonymy for a trio of iconic (and melodiously-named) dinosaurs. The bone-headed dinosaurs Pachycephalosaurus, Stygimoloch, and Dracorex are all one and the same animal, according to their work. The latter two are juvenile stages, whereas Pachycephalosaurus represents a full adult.

How is this possible? The animals look so different, right?

The article in question is the one by Horner, J., & Goodwin, M. (2009). Extreme cranial ontogeny in the Upper Cretaceous dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus.

Background

Extended neoteny and late stage allometric growth increase morphological disparity between growth stages in at least some dinosaurs. Coupled with relatively low dinosaur density in the Upper Cretaceous of North America, ontogenetic transformational representatives are often difficult to distinguish. For example, many hadrosaurids previously reported to represent relatively small lambeosaurine species were demonstrated to be juveniles of the larger taxa. Marginocephalians (pachycephalosaurids + ceratopsids) undergo comparable and extreme cranial morphological change during ontogeny.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Cranial histology, morphology and computer tomography reveal patterns of internal skull development that show the purported diagnostic characters for the pachycephalosaurids Dracorex hogwartsia and Stygimoloch spinifer are ontogenetically derived features. Coronal histological sections of the frontoparietal dome of an adult Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis reveal a dense structure composed of metaplastic bone with a variety of extremely fibrous and acellular tissue. Coronal histological sections and computer tomography of a skull and frontoparietal dome of Stygimoloch spinifer reveal an open intrafrontal suture indicative of a subadult stage of development. These dinosaurs employed metaplasia to rapidly grow and change the size and shape of their horns, cranial ornaments and frontoparietal domes, resulting in extreme cranial alterations during late stages of growth. We propose that Dracorex hogwartsia, Stygimoloch spinifer and Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis are the same taxon and represent an ontogenetic series united by shared morphology and increasing skull length.

Conclusions/Significance

Dracorex hogwartsia (juvenile) and Stygimoloch spinifer (subadult) are reinterpreted as younger growth stages of Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis (adult). This synonymy reduces the number of pachycephalosaurid taxa from the Upper Cretaceous of North America and demonstrates the importance of cranial ontogeny in evaluating dinosaur diversity and taxonomy. These growth stages reflect a continuum rather than specific developmental steps defined by “known” terminal morphologies.

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

And this month, the winner is Bjoern Brembs. He starts his post like this:

Use it or lose it, they say. The saying holds not only for muscle fitness, but also for the brain. The Romans already knew that ‘mens sana in corpore sano‘ and today we know that both physical and mental fitness, exercise and training can stave off many signs of aging. Even debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease can be delayed, or at least their symptoms reduced by staying physically and mentally fit and active. I recently handled a manuscript in my function as Academic Editor for the journal PLoS One, which suggests that the analogy goes even further.

Yes, several of our Academic Editors are bloggers and, in their function as editors, they get to know manuscripts really well: reading several versions, reading reviews and communicating with authors and reviewers, so it is not surprising that their blog posts, when they write about papers they handle, are of exceptional quality. And I cannot discriminate against them just because they are a part of our “inner circle”, can I? I want to see more of them blog about papers they like or handle in PLoS ONE.

The article that Bjoern wrote about (and connected to his own from a couple of years ago) is this one:

Endogenous Human Brain Dynamics Recover Slowly Following Cognitive Effort by Anna Barnes, Edward T. Bullmore and John Suckling, all from the Brain Mapping Unit, Behavioural & Clinical Neurosciences Institute, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom:

Background

In functional magnetic resonance imaging, the brain’s response to experimental manipulation is almost always assumed to be independent of endogenous oscillations. To test this, we addressed the possible interaction between cognitive task performance and endogenous fMRI oscillations in an experiment designed to answer two questions: 1) Does performance of a cognitively effortful task significantly change fractal scaling properties of fMRI time series compared to their values before task performance? 2) If so, can we relate the extent of task-related perturbation to the difficulty of the task?

Methodology/Principal Findings

Using a novel continuous acquisition “rest-task-rest” design, we found that endogenous dynamics tended to recover their pre-task parameter values relatively slowly, over the course of several minutes, following completion of one of two versions of the n-back working memory task and that the rate of recovery was slower following completion of the more demanding (n = 2) version of the task.

Conclusion/Significance

This result supports the model that endogenous low frequency oscillatory dynamics are relevant to the brain’s response to exogenous stimulation. Moreover, it suggests that large-scale neurocognitive systems measured using fMRI, like the heart and other physiological systems subjected to external demands for enhanced performance, can take a considerable period of time to return to a stable baseline state.

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

Again, this was a tough call. I could have gone with any of the three good posts about Matilda, Clancy and Banjo, or the tour-de-force by Orac on popularity versus reliability in medical research, or a really cool post by Anne-Marie Hodge about bats being deterred from wind turbines by radars. Or several others.

But then I noticed something really cool – two bloggers challenged each other to a Scientists’ Duel – a competition, judged by their readers and commenters, in writing a blog post about a peer-reviewed paper.

This is how it all started. Blogger that goes by pseudonym Toaster Sunshine on the Mad Scientist Jr. blog and another pseudonymous bloger Hermitage decided to face off in a duel of science blogging. They, with some help from readers, chose a paper to write about – a PLoS ONE article Unscented Kalman Filter for Brain-Machine Interfaces by Zheng Li, Joseph E. O’Doherty, Timothy L. Hanson, Mikhail A. Lebedev, Craig S. Henriquez and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis:

Brain machine interfaces (BMIs) are devices that convert neural signals into commands to directly control artificial actuators, such as limb prostheses. Previous real-time methods applied to decoding behavioral commands from the activity of populations of neurons have generally relied upon linear models of neural tuning and were limited in the way they used the abundant statistical information contained in the movement profiles of motor tasks. Here, we propose an n-th order unscented Kalman filter which implements two key features: (1) use of a non-linear (quadratic) model of neural tuning which describes neural activity significantly better than commonly-used linear tuning models, and (2) augmentation of the movement state variables with a history of n-1 recent states, which improves prediction of the desired command even before incorporating neural activity information and allows the tuning model to capture relationships between neural activity and movement at multiple time offsets simultaneously. This new filter was tested in BMI experiments in which rhesus monkeys used their cortical activity, recorded through chronically implanted multielectrode arrays, to directly control computer cursors. The 10th order unscented Kalman filter outperformed the standard Kalman filter and the Wiener filter in both off-line reconstruction of movement trajectories and real-time, closed-loop BMI operation.

They gave themselves a couple of days (of reader suspense) to write their offerings. And then they posted their articles simultaneously.

Toaster Sunshine wrote Optimizing Algorithms for Brain-Machine Interfaces:

Imagine waking up trapped in a prison of your own flesh, blinking awake in the dull glow of a softly bleached hospital room. Your arms and legs are unresponsive to the will to move them, to the simple desire to reach up and scratch the itchiness of morphine from your eyes. Nothing happens, nothing responds, nothing moves, nothing feels. You are an immobile head trapped on an unresponsive body, and no matter how loudly you scream against the walls of your confinement from inside your head, nothing happens.

Hermitage wrote Unscented Kalman Filter for Brain-Machine Interfaces:

I found this paper to be really interesting, and challenging. Unlike a boyscout I was not prepared, not a single of my dynamic systems and control books to be found. They’re probably on the ‘used’ shelf back in university going ‘haha sucker, you probably wish you hadn’t sold us back now!!!!’ However, I was a little surprised with the comparisons they used. While the 1st Order Kalman and Wieiner filters may be ‘standard’, I didn’t find it in any way surprising that a quadratic model with memory states would outperform them for such a complex task.

They gave their reader 72 hours to vote by allocating 100 points the way they liked. And then they announced the winner: Hermitage won, narrowly (205 to 195 points), and ToasterSunshine was gracious in defeat.

And now they are encouraging other science bloggers to do these kinds of duels. I love the idea, of course, especially as Open Access papers are particularly well suited for such contests, being freely available to both the bloggers and their readers.

So, which one of the two did I pick for our prize? Well, both of them, of course. The post by ToasterSunshine is targeting lay audience, while the one by Hermitage has more scientific detail. They work together wonderfully well!

So, congratulations to both ToasterSunshine and Hermitage as well as the authors of the article. I have notified the winners and their prizes are on the way. I hope you read both posts and add comments of your own, and then go to the article itself to read it and post comments, notes and ratings there as well.

And I also hope that other bloggers will do similar duels and choose PLoS ONE articles for those in the future.

Although the publication of the paper and the unveiling of the dinosaurs in Queensland, Australia, took place on July 3, a US public holiday, the discovery has generated extensive coverage in the international media and in the blogosphere. At the time of writing, Google News lists over 500 news articles and there have been many more blog posts. We’ve summarised some of the most interesting articles and posts below, although this should not stop you from adding your own discussion comments, notes and ratings directly onto the article.

Media

• New Scientist – Billabong fossil finds end Australia’s dinosaur drought
• SciAm’s 60-Second Science – New dino species discovered in the land Down Under
• National Geographic – Australia Dinosaur Pictures: Three New Species Found
• BBC News – New dinosaurs found in Australia
• The Guardian – Monster haul: Three new dinosaurs discovered
• The Telegraph – Three new species of dinosaur found in Australia
• The Times Online – From T-Rex to Waltzing Matilda – three new dinosaurs found Down Under
• Reuters – Australia discovers 3 new large dinosaurs
• The Associated Press – Australian dinosaur that lived 98M years ago found
• AFP – Three new dinosaur species found in Australia
• The Sydney Morning Herald – Banjo one of the new dinos on the block
• The Age – Prehistoric billabong yields three new Aussie dinosaurs
• ABC News – Winton dinosaur find ‘the tip of the iceberg’
• The Washington Post – A Rare Dinosaur Find Is Made in Australia
• Voice of America – Australian Scientists Identify 3 New Dinosaur Species

Blogs

• The Open Source Paleontologist – The Open Source Paleontologist: An Australian Dinosaur Extravaganza
• A Blog Around the Clock – Waltzing Matilda – why were the three Australian dinosaurs published in PLoS ONE?
• Dracovenator – Three New Dinosaurs – at long last, some dinosaury goodness from Australia
• Chinleana – Kudos to PLoS ONE
• Dinosaur Tracking – Meet Banjo, Matilda and Clancy: Three New Dinosaurs From Australia
• The World We Don’t Live In – Waltzing matildae, and its friends

The Australian Age of Dinosaurs website also has a range of interesting content available, including the press releases, fact files on the dinosaurs, images, and more information on how to take part in one of the AAOD’s Dinosaur Discovery Weeks.

I was somewhat surprised to see how few of those 48 posts were about Ida, considering how many posts about this fossil were written this month – I am assuming that some of the people were not sending their posts to ResearchBlogging.org (or trackbacks to the paper itself, where a healthy scientific debate is occurring in the comments).

Anyway, I was very happy with the last month’s crop of posts – pretty much every one of the 48 entries could have won. And the decision was really difficult. But after mulling over it for a while, and then sleeping over it, I finally decided – my Pick for Blog of the Month for May 2009 is….drumroll, please:

Christie Wilcox of Observations of a Nerd for the post Size does matter!

Christie’s post discusses a recent article Larger than Life: Humans’ Nonverbal Status Cues Alter Perceived Size by Marsh AA, Yu HH, Schechter JC and Blair RJR. Here is the abstract:

Background

Social dominance and physical size are closely linked. Nonverbal dominance displays in many non-human species are known to increase the displayer’s apparent size. Humans also employ a variety of nonverbal cues that increase apparent status, but it is not yet known whether these cues function via a similar mechanism: by increasing the displayer’s apparent size.

Methodology/Principal Finding

We generated stimuli in which actors displayed high status, neutral, or low status cues that were drawn from the findings of a recent meta-analysis. We then conducted four studies that indicated that nonverbal cues that increase apparent status do so by increasing the perceived size of the displayer. Experiment 1 demonstrated that nonverbal status cues affect perceivers’ judgments of physical size. The results of Experiment 2 showed that altering simple perceptual cues can affect judgments of both size and perceived status. Experiment 3 used objective measurements to demonstrate that status cues change targets’ apparent size in the two-dimensional plane visible to a perceiver, and Experiment 4 showed that changes in perceived size mediate changes in perceived status, and that the cue most associated with this phenomenon is postural openness.

Conclusions/Significance

We conclude that nonverbal cues associated with social dominance also affect the perceived size of the displayer. This suggests that certain nonverbal dominance cues in humans may function as they do in other species: by creating the appearance of changes in physical size.

Christie writes:

What they found was that, unanimously across the board, people that looked taller were perceived as more dominant. Even the same actor in the exact same pose, with simply a change in the background to make him look shorter, looked less dominant. But even more amazingly, the status implied by the posture an actor took, whether sitting or standing, affected how tall they appeared to the participants. Actors in authoritative status poses were judged to be on average an inch taller and 5 lbs heavier than when they were in submissive ones, whether sitting or standing.

Part of the effect, the researchers found, is due to silhouettes. When we’re in certain poses, we look like we take up more space – literally. By analyzing the pixels in a 2d manner of different poses, the researchers found that we, in effect, are larger when we’re in dominant positions. As the authors explain, “Although the targets’ actual size did not vary across poses, in the sense that their actual height and weight were unchanged, the targets’ apparent size in the two-dimensional plane visible to a perceiver varied significantly.”

Congratulations both to Christie and to the authors of the article. I have notified the winners and their prizes are on the way. I hope you read Christie’s post and post a comment of your own, and then go to the article itself to read it and post comments, notes and ratings there as well. And don’t forget to send trackbacks to the article when you blog about it, and to make sure that your post is aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org to be eligible for the next month’s prize.