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01.19.07
Posted in site news at 7:15 pm by Trevor
There have been a few changes to the site that I’ve made over the past couple months that I wanted to make everyone aware of. For starters, if you haven’t noticed lately, I have set up the RSS feed to be handled exclusively by FeedBurner. This allows me to keep an eye on how many of you are reading about epigenetics through an RSS reader. I read this and many other sites through my preferred RSS reader, NetNewsWire Lite for Mac OS X. More importantly, the RSS feed is now a full feed, so if you were annoyed by the summaries I used in the past, the full content is now available through the feed. I hope that is helpful.
Also, you may have noticed that the site has picked up some more sponsorships and advertisers. For instance, we are a sponsoring publication of Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Epigenomics conference, and we are prominently advertising the conference through March. In addition, there are sponsored text links in the sidebar from CalculateMe.com, Medical Software Associates, Health Insurance Choice, and Red Apple Living.
As the site has grown tremendously since its inception in March 2006, there is a likely possibility that we will have to move to a new server in the near future to accommodate the extra bandwidth requirements. These sponsorships will make that transition possible.
In addition, I have moved the list of epigenetics labs (that is still in its infancy) from the sidebar to a separate page. This was done in order to reduce the load time for pages across the site. I am still working on adding labs as I come across them; if you have any additions, please drop me a line.
I decided last month to add a short profile and picture of myself to the sidebar in order to help readers easily see who the author is and hopefully will encourage readers to discover more about how the content is prepared and selected. I attempted to clarify this in this post, but figured a more prominent display would be more effective. Plus, if there was any confusion about whether this was a blog or a news site that could potentially be a blog, that should clear things up.
As far as posting frequency, I have tried to be more consistent with the number of posts each week. I hope that you will bear with the occasional quiet days as I attempt to keep up with courses this semester and continue work on writing a research paper. But, rest assured, that we will try to keep up with all of the major developments in epigenetics. In fact, there have been some big papers that have not gotten their due attention here, but Mr. Rekow and I are preparing to review several of them in full as part of the upcoming Just Science week.
Finally, I decided to experiment with a syndicated feed of links gathered by Environmental Health Sciences. The feed, available in the sidebar on the right, is currently set to grab articles related to gene expression, which can also include areas of epigenetics. I’m monitoring the quality of the links in terms of relevancy for our audience. But you may be interested by some of the articles available there, even if they’re not directly related to epigenetics research and discoveries.
With that said, please feel free to leave any feedback, suggestions, complaints, etc. in the comments. I’m listening.
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01.17.07
Posted in commentary, news links, site news at 8:52 pm by Trevor
There is a movement afoot, known as the Just Science Challenge, that aims to have science bloggers post only about science for the week beginning Monday, February 2 and ending Sunday, February 8.
During that time each blogger should post about science only, with at least one post per day. Furthermore, issues which are favored by anti-scientific groups (creationism, global warming, etc.) should be either avoided, or discussed without reference to anti-scientific positions.
Since the challenge calls for at least one post per day and this site’s curator is a full-time student, half-time researcher, full-time husband and father, I have asked Stephen Rekow (aka Shane) to assist with the week-long event. (I just realized that Mr. Rekow has all of those same responsibilities, plus his son is much younger than my 13-year-old. Good thinking, Trevor.) Shane is also an undergraduate researcher at WSU, and has been working at the lab and on our project for much longer than I have. You should go ahead and jot down his name if you’re a researcher looking for molecular biology grad students. His publications, oral presentations of research, and awards/scholarships as an undergrad are nearly unheard of, and he will most likely teach your postdocs a few things about good wet lab work.
With that said, we plan on covering some of the latest epigenetics research articles, and will most likely traverse some terrain that this site has never been across before (such as the wide world of epigenetics research in plants). Hopefully these posts will be informative and educational for both the students (that would be us) and the readers (that would be you).
If you write a science blog, I would encourage you to accept the challenge. So far, it looks like the following blogs have also accepted the challenge:
Link
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12.27.06
Posted in commentary, site news at 6:38 am by Trevor
I would like to wish our readers a safe and happy holidays. As for me, this is winter break time at Washington State University, which means that I have just completed my time off from school/work and will now spend the remainder of break in the lab. I am continuing work on a paper as well as keeping up with work on a research project studying the transgenerational effects of endocrine disruptors. The break looks good on paper for getting lots of things done, but in practice the break is over by the time you’ve got the problems worked out of the PCR parameters and the assays are running smoothly.
As for Epigenetics News, expect more research coverage and other items that I’m cooking up for the coming year. I have appreciated the feedback and comments that I’ve received on specific topics that people would like to see more coverage on. Please drop a line in the comments as to your take on the site thus far or what you would like to see done in the coming year. I promise to respond to all as quickly as possible.
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11.14.06
Posted in commentary, site news at 7:46 pm by Trevor
Judging from some of the e-mails that I’ve received, a portion of our readers are quite interested in epigenetics because their own research is in this exciting field. I’ve decided to start a list of research lab Web sites that focus on epigenetics research. You’ll notice that the list to the right is short at this point, with only a handful of some of the labs that are currently working in epigenetics.
It would be great to have a more comprehensive list of the epigenetics researchers out there. There would be numerous benefits to composing a list of epigenetics researchers, such as:
- Graduate school applicants or postdoctoral researchers interested in epigenetics could have a starting point for finding a research lab that fits with their research interests;
- Researchers would have a resource for easily connecting with peers in the epigenetics field;
- Increased visibility and exposure for your research and, ultimately, the field of epigenetics.
If your lab is working in epigenetics and has a Web site, please drop me an e-mail: adminATepigeneticsnews.com, or leave a comment to this post.
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11.11.06
Posted in reviews, site news at 4:25 pm by Trevor
ReviewMe is a new service that offers bloggers an opportunity to receive paid offers from advertisers to review a Web site on their blog. I decided to give the service a try because there are some clear-cut rules that must be adhered to when a blogger accepts a paid review offer from an advertiser.
For instance, the review must be identified as a paid review. As you may see at the top of this post, there is no confusion that it is a paid review. However, advertisers are told up-front that they may not stipulate that a review be positive. That means that I’m free to review the site honestly and openly criticize a site as I see fit. I don’t see any problem with this kind of service when both of these guidelines are in place.
The real benefit to advertisers for this service is that rather than being placed as an ad on a site, your site will be linked as part of the “normal” content of the blog. That means that your Web site will show up in the RSS feed, for example, and the review of the site will likely be indexed by Google. The review will also contain a link to your site, and the backlink may provide a boost to your own page ranking at Google.
Based upon this site’s Technorati ranking and other criteria, the price that the site is asking for a paid review at Epigenetics News is US$60. The “ranking” of this site will be monitored over time and the price will be adjusted as needed.
ReviewMe will not accept all bloggers that apply, but right now they have set aside $25,000 to give to those that sign up, are accepted, and review their service on their blog. Link
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11.04.06
Posted in site news at 10:46 am by Trevor
I wanted to call reader attention to a new feature I just added on individual post pages that provides links to related articles at Epigenetics News. This should be helpful in finding past posts related to the topic that you’re currently reading about. This feature was added via a nice plug-in from WASABI, WordPress Related Entries. For other WordPress blog owners out there who are interested, it took about 3 minutes to install, so you want want to give it a shot.
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08.02.06
Posted in commentary, news links, site news at 8:46 pm by Trevor
So you might have noticed that the posts have slowed down considerably over the past few weeks.
I’ll just come out and say it: I’ve been busy in the lab. There was a little pressure put on last month to finish the study that I’m working on, so I’ve focused hard on doing just that. There has been a lot of time spent at the microscope, a long series of immunohistochemistry experiments, and a number of side distractions to make completing the work a little tougher.
But the hard work has paid off. No, the study isn’t done, but it is producing some interesting results. Results that will likely be published in a peer-reviewed journal in the future. I’ll be sure to update the readers once it becomes publicly available.
With that said, there has been some great science writing published around the blogosphere over the past few weeks. Conveniently, a good portion of it is covered in Tangled Bank #59. Link
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06.11.06
Posted in commentary, news links, site news at 1:14 pm by admin
Highlights among the new blogs at Science Blogs include:
- The Loom: Written by Carl Zimmer, a freelance science writer who has written five books on science topics and appears regularly in The New York Times and numerous magazines;
- Effect Measure: “A forum for argument and discussion about progressive public health ideas,” which has been dominated by coverage of the bird flu;
- The Island of Doubt: “Subjects tackled will range from the intrusion of religion in the public sphere to the presentation of research by the media and the social implications of recent discoveries”.
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06.07.06
Posted in site news at 7:00 am by admin
The newsletter will be mailed out every Sunday at 8 am PT. Thanks to Genetics and Health for leading me to Zookoda, which is handling all of the logistics of the newsletter for free.
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05.31.06
Posted in news links, site news at 7:31 pm by admin
Of course, according to some researchers, my marriage may have signaled the beginning of the end of my productivity in science. Link
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04.09.06
Posted in commentary, site news at 5:05 pm by admin
From the moment that I let slip to other members of the lab that I had started a blog about epigenetics, the inevitable questions were, “Why? What’s the point? Who’s going to read it?”
Well, I’m going to answer those questions for everyone to read.
While I’ve only really been involved in research for a few years now, it has been my experience that there exists a lack of fundamental knowledge on the part of the “lab staff” on not only the concepts and rationales for their own area of investigation, but also they are not familiar with recent advances made in their field for months, if not years after they are published.
I formerly worked as a news editor and writer, and with me being accustomed to keeping on top of everything new in my field, I found this trend to be baffling. The information was clearly out there, but why weren’t they reading it?
Well, perhaps they just don’t care. After all, it’s essentially their job to do what they’re told to do by the principal investigator. Maybe they’re just there to come in to work, run their assays, and go home with their paycheck. Thank you very much.
But maybe they really are interested in knowing more about what’s going on in their field of research, but it’s just too difficult to keep on top of everything. It takes too much time, and that’s time that could be used to set up another PCR.
So, that was my initial rational for creating Epigenetics News. It has since become clear that many others are also intrigued by the field of epigenetics, and so perhaps this will be a helpful resource for many others to explore the world of methylation.
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04.02.06
Posted in site news at 1:33 am by admin
I would like to thank Razib and the readers of his great blog Gene Expression for checking out this very new blog offering news and information in the field of epigenetics. Please keep an eye out in the upcoming weeks as additional information and resources on epigenetics is being developed.
Update: Also thank you to Hsien at Genetics and Health for the mention.
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03.18.06
Posted in site news at 8:55 pm by admin
Welcome to Epigenetics News. This site opened on March 18, 2006 with the goal of providing up-to-date developments in the area of epigenetics. We’re pleased that you’ve decided to stop by and hope that you’ll continue to come back as the site develops.
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