Mamels life animal

You’re an academic and you want to reach a wider audience. You are going to translate the kickass science in your area of expertise for the layperson in the awesome form of open access online essays (doesn’t that sound better than “blogpost”?). After years, if not decades, of honing your acadamese, your new challenge is jettisoning all that obfuscation and jargon to make nuanced information accessible, interpretable, and communicable among non-experts. Here is a handy-dandy definitive guide that has everything you need to know in its entirety and no reader could possibly benefit from reading additional essays from numerous brilliant others by google-searching phrases like “ how to blog as an academic .” the internet But obviously this guide is superior because it HAS AN ACRONYM!  The ACCESS guide to academic blogging™ A udience • C urrent • C ontent • E xpertise • S tory • S ocial media A. Identifying your AUDIENCE early in the process is key. Make a list of categories of people you

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