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Suppose the UK government decides that the country needs more apples. It gives out thousands of grants to householders so they can buy and plant their own fruit trees. I receive one of those grants and go to Garden Centre A to buy my trees. They say “Sorry, we don’t sell apple trees.

In the last couple of days, the House of Lords (the upper house of the UK government) has issued a call for evidence for a short inquiry into the Government’s open access policy and its implementation by the Research Councils UK (RCUK). The inquiry will cover four main areas: Support for universities through funds to cover article processing charges; Embargo periods for articles published under open access;

I’ve measured a few necks in my time, including the neck of a baby giraffe. I can tell you from experience that necks are awkward things to measure, even if they have been conveniently divested of their heads and torsos. They have a tendency to curl up, which impedes attempts to find the straight-line length.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-7373 attachment-id=“7373” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/01/08/this-is-awesome/kioga/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/kioga.jpg” orig-size=“361,600” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"HP Scanjet djf300","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}” image-title=“Kioga”

A few weeks ago, we were considering the bizarre Umbaran Starfighter from The Clone Wars , and its extraordinary similarity to an Apatosaurus cervical: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-7368 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7368” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/01/04/umbaran-starfighter-update/1322344262m_splash/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1322344262m_splash.jpeg” orig-size=“500,355”

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After the authors’ own work, the biggest contribution to a published paper is the reviews provided, gratis, by peers. When peer-review works as it’s supposed to, they add significant value to the final paper. But the actual reviews are never seen by anyone except the authors and the handling editor. This is bad for several reasons.

A couple of days ago, a paper by Tschopp and Mateus (2012) described and named a new diplodocine from the Morrison Formation, Kaatedocus siberi , based on a beautifully preserved specimen consisting of a complete skull and the first fourteen cervical vertebrae.

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?