Announcing “Hourglass”, a blog carnival for the biology of aging: July 8, 2008

Ouroboros’ second anniversary is coming up this weekend, and I thought it might be nice to do something special to commemorate the occasion.

There’s enough good science blogging about the biology of aging that the community deserves its own monthly carnival (along the lines of the general-biology carnival Tangled Bank, or the neuroscience carnival Encephalon, both of which we’ve hosted here before). So let’s start one. I thought long and hard about names and settled on “Hourglass,” which is topical enough to be appropriate, but general to be inclusive.

I’ll host the first installation next Tuesday, July 8th, and organize the hosting arrangements thereafter — sometime after the first issue I’ll create a page here devoted to past, current and future hosts.

Topics of posts should have something to do with the biology of aging, broadly speaking — including fundamental research in biogerontology, age-related disease, ideas about life extension technologies, your personal experience with calorie restriction, maybe even something about the sociological implications of increased longevity. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the management, so feel free to subvert the dominant paradigm. If in doubt, submit anyway. About the only sorts of things I’m going to turn away are quackery or promotions of a commercial product. So, no growth hormone commercials or glowing reviews of your own book, please. 🙂

In terms of original publication date — for future issues we’ll probably want to limit contributions to articles published within the last month. Since this is the first issue, however anything published prior to July 8 (i.e., anything ever published) would be great.

So if you’re a biogerontology blogger, a science blogger with one great post about aging, or anyone else who wants to make a relevant submission to Hourglass I, please email me. (Do the same if you’d like to host a future Hourglass, as well.) With your submission, I would also welcome any appropriate images that you’d like to accompany your submission — see here for an example of what I’m talking about.