Mamels life animal

In honor of Open Access Week , I was delighted to contribute to  a panel, hosted by the ASU library , discussing the pros and pitfalls of open access publishing from the perspectives of different stakeholders. I have published #OA in dedicated venues ( Public Library of Science ) and I have footed the bill to make an article immediately open access when published in a traditional journal . And while I framed open access as a moral good in terms of concept, the reality is that it can be incredibly expensive, depending. So assuming you are not independently wealthy or a Nobel prize winner who can launch his own open access journal , or for whatever reason aren't in the position to go "all in" and always publish open access, it can be worthwhile to selectively deploy open access papers as a tactic in a broader scholarly strategy.   Going all in on Freedom.  & Freedom Isn’t Free. In preparation for the panel, I put together some slides to better articulate the framing of

A few weeks ago, Zac Lewis and I were writing an essay " Mother's Littlest Helpers ." To organize my thinking, I made a flow chart conceptual model of the microbial colonization of the newborn's gut.  After elaborating the model and developing powerpoint drawing skills (angry eyebrows!)...  TA DA- the 1st Mammals Suck comic! Related Posts: Pigeon milk and Microbiota  (yes, pigeon milk!) Milk Evolution and Bacterial Stowaways Mega Mammal Milk Analysis

Getting the Message via Milk We can imagine hormones are like a Facebook status post. Just as a Facebook status will only show up in the newsfeed of certain friends (I still don’t get the FB algorithm for this), hormone messages are only received by tissues that have the right receptors. In this way, specialized glands secrete a hormone to convey the body’s “status,” and the “friended” tissues—those with the receptor—are updated. This is known as the endocrine system. “Endo” of course is a Latin derivative meaning ‘within’ our own bodies. Images from Purves et al., Life: The Science of Biology, 4th Edition But what about hormones we get from someone else… like from our mother through her milk? This system is clearly not endocrine… the hormones are coming from another body via her mammary glands during lactation. For this reason they are termed “lactocrine” and the numerous bioactives in milk, including proteins, peptides, and steroids, might be messages from mother to baby. when I was

“ … find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors), in order to serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically based assumptions .”                                                      -Reviewer to @FionaIngleby Yep. The recipe for a manuscript to some “colleagues” apparently requires a pinch or two of male. Luckily the internet is a thing, providing the venue to expose this heaping pile of horseshit...  very quickly even more awesomeness emerged on the twitter #AddMaleAuthorGate THANK YOU Leon Eyrich Jessen ‏@jessenleon & Mick Watson ‏@BioMickWatson   Importantly, journalists and academics have already delivered great coverage and exquisite essays on event #721 of recent descriptions of gendered experiences in academia. In recent years, studies have reported real world disparity of invitations to talk