Procrastination with Scientific Social Networks

I have written before about Google Scholar as a way to follow your co-authors, colleagues or just to get alerts from a certain topic. Today, I talk about other websites that have nice features which Google Scholar doesn't have and which can be useful: BiomedExperts, ResearchGate and Academia.edu.

 


BiomedExperts is a scientific social network for biomedical experts.The main features of this webpage are the visualization tools about researchers. You can see the published topics, published articles, co-authors, times and places, network view and geonetwork view. These two last ones are very nice to visualize and give you information that Google Scholar doesn't provide you.

ResearchGate is another scientific network, but it is available for all research topics. It has basically all the features of BiomedExperts, expect the network visualization, but it has other ones, such as citation management, endorsement management (like LinkedIn) and even allows you to publish data (or download it).





Academia.edu is another scientific network with a lot of users. The main difference from the other two is that it allows you to put papers which are not finished or were not accepted. The thing I most like in this webpage is that it gives me an alert whenever my profile appears in google results, so basically I know when other researchers googled me and which words they used for that.

This post was an idea from a fellow researcher.

Obama's BRAIN Initiative

On the 2nd April, President Obama has made a speech about a new initiative to study the brain. This new initiative is called BRAIN - Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies.This initiative has been inspired in the Genome Project. His speech can be seen here or read here.



For me, the most important remark was: "So there is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. " My work is close to this idea using, of course, medical imaging, so I am really interested in this initiative.




About the budget involved, it might be considerably smaller than the Genome Project (3.8 billion), but the announced kick-start for the project was about 100$ million, while for the Genome Project was 28$ million. This kick-start will fund projects in the scope of the initiative: 50$ million from DARPA, 40$ million from NIH and 20$ million from NSF. Private sector will also contribute about 158$ million: 60$ million from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, 30$ million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 28$ million from Salk Institute for Biological Studies and 4$ million from the Kavli Foundation, among others.

White House links: Blog, Fact Sheet and Infographics

Scientist are snobs?

A great friend of mine has suggested that I read the article Lab life: Scientists are snobs. I have read it and I agree with a lot of what is written. I am European, so instead of states which are less funded, we have countries which are less funded than others, because these big labs are indeed in only some of these countries. Coming from a less funded country and lab, I actually always have a good amount of people in my posters, but I rarely get citations to my work... And I have to confess that at conferences, my first priority is to see all presentations and posters from my specific field and only after I go for the big lab names... And do supervisors have more time in small labs? Actually I think it depends on the supervisor...

What are your views on this?

The Human Brain Project

The European Commission has officially announced the selection of the Human Brain Project (HBP) as one of its two FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) Flagship projects. The new project will coordinate European efforts to address one of the greatest challenges of modern science: understanding the human brain.

"Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science. If we can rise to the challenge, we can gain profound insights into what makes us human, develop new treatments for brain diseases and build revolutionary new computing technologies."


"According to a recent report, nearly one-third of the European population is affected by some kind of psychiatric or neurological disease (anxiety, mood disorders, neurodegenerative disease, etc.)."

The promoting video is very instructive and I'm very exciting about the database with medical images, of course... I hope this project will be very successful!

Big Picture

Ever wondered how to explain medical imaging concepts to high-school students or people which are not from the science field? Welcome Trust has dedicated its latest issue of Big Picture Magazine to neuroimaging techniques. You can download the pdf here and also other teaching materials.

One of the nice images of this pdf is shown below: a CT angiograghy where you can see the brain vessels.