Category Archives: Science

I co-authored a perspective piece in the June issue of PLoS Computational Biology about a new subfield of scientometrics that Nicholas Christakis and I are calling eurekometrics: Until recently, the quantitative study of science has focused on studying patterns in publications, such as citation counts to discern impact, and in coauthorship networks to discern collaboration. [...]

Last week I was in Germany for the Altmetrics11 workshop at the ACM Web Science 2011 conference, and had the opportunity to go to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. If you love the history of technology, typography, the history of printing, or even just seeing lots and lots of old books, this museum will astonish [...]

Belly button, navel, umbilicus. Whatever you call it, it’s a source of great scientific inquiry. After reading recently about the Belly Button Biodiversity project, devoted to chronicling the bacterial flora of the belly button, I thought that it’s time to have a repository for the most interesting belly button-related research. Therefore, this post will act [...]

I co-authored a paper in PLoS ONE, published today, entitled Geographic Constraints on Social Network Groups. Essentially, we tried to understand the relationship between position in a social network and physical location by examining social networks at the level of the social group. Here’s a figure from the paper that shows the interplay between the [...]

Interested in seeing what the very first issue of Nature, published November 4, 1869, looks like? Check it out here. For a bit of scientific context, On the Origin of Species had been published almost exactly ten years ago (November 24, 1859) and the Dinosaur Wars were raging. Evidence of this is even found in [...]

A large team has examined millions of biomedical documents in order to see how various text similarity methods cluster the different articles. These techniques, grouped under the loose banner of machine learning, look at how words appear together in an article, the frequency of words, and more, in order to create a rich picture of [...]

Wondering how long scientific journalism has been around? Since at least the Nineteenth Century world of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, in The Valley of Fear, when referring to a treatise by his nemesis Moriarty, notes that it’s “a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no [...]