In the manuscript, Dancing for Food in the Deep Sea: Bacterial Farming by a New Species of Yeti Crab, researchers discovered that the “Yeti Crab” (Kiwa puravida), which lives off the coast of Costa Rica, consumes the nutrient-rich bacteria it cultivates on its claws.  Wired, National Geographic and Scientific American covered the article.

On average, Twitter users tend to be the happiest on Saturdays. This trend, along with others, was reported in a study called, Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter.  It received media coverage from The Daily Dose, Gawker, and National Geographic. This is just for spacing

In the study, Suicidal Behavior and Depression in Smoking Cessation Treatments, researchers collected and analyzed data from the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) database, spanning 1998 through September 2010. The results indicated that of 3,249 reported cases of suicidal/self-injurious behavior or depression, 90% reported use of varenicline, an anti-smoking drug sold under the brand name Chantix. The article was covered by CNN, ABC News, and TIME.

According to the paper, The Network of Global Corporate Control, 147 companies control 40% of the world’s economy. Swiss researchers have produced a map of the global economic structure, showing the intricate, interconnectedness among companies, similar to the relationships found in nature. This image highlights some of the major transnational corporations in the financial sector.  Media outlets that covered this paper included The Huffington Post, NewScientist, and Forbes.

The T-rex is heavier than previously thought according to the paper, A Computational Analysis of Limb and Body Dimensions in Tyrannosaurus rex with Implications for Locomotion, Ontogeny, and Growth. Researchers used computer models of four T-rex fossil specimens to assess its body mass. The results indicate that the adult dino was 30% heavier than formerly estimated. Xinhua, The Christian Science Monitor, and Slashdot are a few of the media outlets that covered this article.

Children as young as 15 months may have a basic understanding of fairness according to the research presented in the manuscript, Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants.  Science 2.0, Scientific American, and WFAA-TV covered this article. This is just for spacin This is just for spacing.This is just for spacing.g.

In August, the Centers for Disease Control announced the results of its first multi-year analysis of HIV incidence in the United States from 2006 to 2009. The paper, which published in PLoS ONE, found that though the rate of HIV infection remained steady; it disproportionately affected several racial and ethnic populations in the United States. The paper received a lot of media attention and was covered by: NPR, The New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle among others.

The paper, Functional Tooth Regeneration Using a Bioengineered Tooth Unit as a Mature Organ Replacement Regenerative Therapy received global media attention. Some of the media outlets that covered the paper include: Reuters, Times of India, and ABC News 24. This is just for spacing.This is just for spacing.This is just for spacing.This is just for spacing.

Researchers at MIT developed an antiviral therapy that could be used to treat variety of viruses. The drug, called Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) enters mammalian cells and selectively kills cells containing viral dsRNA, without harming uninfected cells.  Details of the study can be found in the paper entitled, Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Therapeutics. News coverage on this article included articles by Voice of America, LA Times, and Forbes.

A science career affects the life satisfaction of science faculty according to the article, Scientists Want More Children. The Wall Street Journal and TIME’s Ecocentric blog covered this article.

In the paper, Epigenetic Predictor of Age, researchers from UCLA discovered that they could predict someone’s age using the DNA from their saliva.  There were many articles written on the paper. Some of these media outlets included Time, 80 beats, and CNET.

For Emperor penguins, huddling is essential to surviving the cold Antarctic winter. In the paper, Coordinated Movements Prevent Jamming in an Emperor Penguin Huddle, researchers show that penguins avoid jamming using coordinated movements. Media coverage of this article included pieces by The New York Times, News for Your Neurons and LiveScience.

Lisa Cosgrove et al. published an article entitled, Antidepressants and Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk: A Review of the Literature and Researchers’ Financial Associations with Industry. The paper received media attention from CTV, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Boston Globe.

The paper, Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees, received coverage from The Loom, The Economist, The Telegraph, and New Scientist.   To read the story behind this paper, check out Eisen’s blog, Phylogenomics.

Dr. David Hughes and colleagues published a paper about the Hidden Diversity Behind the Zombie-Ant Fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis: Four New Species Described from Carpenter Ants in Minas Gerais, Brazil.  Their paper received media coverage from: CNN, Wired, National Geographic, and 80 Beats. This is just for spacing. This is just for spacing.

In February, researchers described their recent findings of three ancient skull cups found with skeletal remains from Gough’s Cave in England. The paper, Earliest Directly-Dated Human Skull-Cups, received coverage from NPR, BBC, New York Times, Time, CNN and Not Exactly Rocket Science.

According to the paper, Dietary Fat Intake and the Risk of Depression: The SUN Project, those who had an increased consumption of trans-fat also had an increased risk of developing depression. The study by Almudena Sánchez-Villegas et al. received a lot of media attention in January.  Some of the coverage includes: TIME, Xinhua, Times of India and la Repubblica.

Researchers are beginning to key into the movement too, not just as users, but also as active investigators of the dynamics and utility of these new technologies as they emerge and grow. One of the amazing effects of these social networking sites is the wealth of data they can provide, and now scientists are taking advantage of the huge amount of public content from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even Wikipedia to answer all kinds of new questions.

For example, investigators showed that Twitter is a useful tool for tracking H1N1 here and here; that content disputes in Wikipedia reflect geopolitical instability; and that virtual social networks can create collective emotional states.

Today, we added to this growing body of work with a report of a Twitter-based “hedonometer” that can be used to quantify the societal happiness of large populations. The authors used an amazing library of 46 billion words from nearly 4.6 billion tweets posted over almost three years by over 63 million unique users – a collection that would have been essentially impossible to obtain without the Twitter-verse.

The paper reports various trends in happiness – people are happier on the weekend, and the word “Christmas” is associated with high happiness levels, as opposed to “flu” and “Iraq,” which rank at the bottom – but the real advancement of the paper is its quantitative approach to the huge Twitter-based dataset. While scientists now have access to these huge datasets, they must first face the challenge of classifying and organizing the huge amounts of social information so they can conduct meaningful research into areas that have not previously been explored.

Image courtesy of La Fabrique de Blogs

In addition, we also have the same functionality operating at the article level. The widget is able to display tweets about a particular article by looking for the article DOI appearing in an ‘unpacked’ URL. If there are no tweets for a particular article, it will not appear.

The paper, Inner Speech during Silent Reading Reflects the Reader’s Regional Accent, is a nice example of this widget in use.

We should point out that this handy widget has a few limitations.  For one, the widget isn’t able to store tweets for all eternity.  It will only be able to show recent tweets. Also, it isn’t connected to our Article Level Metrics …yet (we’re working on it though).

Otherwise, we think this widget will make a nice new addition to our site and will be a helpful way to see what our community is saying.

Twitter is a microblogging site that give users like PLoS 140 characters to answer the simple question “what are you doing?”.

For a while we’ve been following Marcia on Twitter, she’s a Brazilian based Science Communicator, specializing in biomedicine and a member of the National Association of Science Writers-USA.  She travels around her country teaching students in some of the best hospitals and universities how to write good manuscripts and powerpoints. She uses PLoS articles extensively in her classes as a teaching aid. Here are some of her exercises:

1) In the abstract below, identify what information belongs to each section of the article (introduction, Material and Methods, Results and Discussion). For this task she uses a PLoS Pathogens paper entitled Viral Paratransgenesis in the Malaria Vector Anopheles gambiae.

2) In the introductions below, identify the following: background information, the question the article aims to answer, and the approach used by the authors to answer/test their hypothesis. For this task she uses two PLoS ONE articles, one entitled Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science, and the other Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk.

3) In the discussion below, indicate all the places where the author needs to add a reference (for this she removes the indication of references from the text and show the original version when they finish the exercise). For this task the PLoS ONE article she uses is Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk.

4) For the Power Point Workshop, she asks them to read the PLoS Computational Biology article entitled Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article and pretend they are the authors of the paper who were invited for a 10-minute presentation on the subject in an international meeting. This requires them to learn how to identify the main message and prepare no more than 5 to 6 slides to be presented in only 10 minutes.

We’re always delighted to know that PLoS articles, freely accessible to everyone, are being used to train the next generation of scientists in the skills of good scientific communication. We also encourage this art form through our editors summaries and through articles such as the Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published, from a collection about best practice for career-minded scientists in PLoS Computational Biology.