I happened to be browsing Gerald L. Woods superb Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (3rd edition) this morning, and happened across this fragment on page 76: The wording struck me as strange: highest of any living warm-blooded animal? Is Wood just being redundant here, or is he implying that there are cold-blooded animals with a higher mass-specific metabolic rate? The idea seems inherently contradictory, doesn’t it?

Just sayin’: vs. (From here.) Update The rest of the Umbaran Starfighter Saga: Was the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra? (Dec. 13, 2012) Heck, yes, the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars was inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra (Dec. 15, 2012) Umbaran Starfighter update (Jan.

Yesterday, Matt showed you this starship from the Star Wars universe: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-7306 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7306” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/12/13/was-the-umbaran-starfighter-from-clone-wars-inspired-by-an-apatosaurus-vertebra/umbaranstarfighter-swe/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/umbaranstarfighter-swe.png” orig-size=“462,482” comments-opened=“1”

[Originally written as a comment on Martin Coward’s blog, but I thought the point was worth making as its own post.] Here’s my take on the widely used Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) in contrast to more restrictive CC licences such as the Non-Commercial variant (CC BY-NC). It may be true, as Martin suggests, that CC BY-NC is better for the author than CC BY. But authors are part of a community, and it’s unquestionably

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We know that most academic journals and edited volumes ask authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement before proceeding with publication. When this is done, the publisher becomes the owner of the paper; the author may retain some rights according to the grace or otherwise of the publisher. Plenty of authors have rightly railed against this land-grab, which publishers have been quite unable to justify.

It’s an oddity to me that when publishers try to justify their existence with long lists of the valuable services they provide, they usually skip lightly over one of the few really big ones.

A few months ago, Matt and Darren saw a picture someone had done of an Apatosaurus with huge neck-flaps. Since they, they’ve tried to find it again but without success.

There’s been a lot of concern in some corners of the world about the Finch Report’s preference for Gold open access, and the RCUK policy’s similar leaning. Much of the complaining has focussed on the cost of Gold OA publishing: Article Processing Charges (APCs) are very offputting to researchers with limited budgets. I thought it would be useful to provide a page that I (and you) can link to when facing such concerns.

I just saw this tweet from palaeohistologist Sarah Werning, and it summed up what science is all about so well that I wanted to give it wider and more permanent coverage: https://twitter.com/sarahwerning/status/277321783571517442 This is exactly right. Kudos to Sarah for saying it so beautifully.

The problem Its often been noted that under the author-pays model of publication (Gold open access), journals have a financial incentive to publish as many articles as possible so as to collect as many article processing charges as possible.