Now we are six

A somewhat belated happy birthday to Fight Aging!, an important resource for lifespan extension advocates that also has some of the best (and constantly improving) scientific coverage in the field. Fight Aging! (and its older companion effort The Longevity Meme) are two fine websites that this humble blog is proud to count as friends. We might not agree on everything, but then again, who does?

If you’re not reading Fight Aging!, you should be.

Congratulations to FA’s proprietor, Reason. Happy sixth blogiversary, and many (many, many…) happy returns!

 

Back from the dead, hopefully for real this time

I’m trying to claw my way back from a long period of inactivity. In late 2009, experiments and other work prevented me from devoting time to this project, and even after some of those obligations lightened, I was finding it difficult to get back in the saddle. My last moment of inspiration turned out to be a false alarm, and rumors of my resurrection had been greatly exaggerated. Most of the posts in the final quarter of last year were made by one of our other writers (turritopsis’ excellent coverage of the SENS4 conference).

There are a number of forces conspiring against my blogging actively. Most have to do with tradeoffs: I have a limited amount of time (less than I used to, now that I’m commuting from Oakland to Novato every day) and energy, and – especially given how long I’ve been a postdoc – it’s hard to justify spending time on a project that doesn’t create new data. Also I have some ambivalence about the value of blogging as a filter for the literature.

But I’ve decided that this is important to me, for a variety of reasons, both selfish and other-centered. I like the way that Ouroboros helps me keep on top of the literature – even if I’m deciding not to write about an article, I’m thinking about it – and I’ve been missing that. I also liked the small but growing sense that I was doing something that other people enjoyed, and that benefited the field as a whole. On the careerist side: Knowing the field helps me choose the best experiments to do in my own work. Beyond that, as my generation gradually takes over the reigns of academic science, more and more people will appreciate the value of activities like blogging – so hopefully there will be no ultimate career tradeoff between time spent blogging and time spent on research activities.

So as of tomorrow, I’ll be back, in some form. I’ve decided to give the project a certain amount of time every day, and get done what I can in that time, and not worry so much about the absolute amount of writing I get done. Hopefully those of you who are interested will have something new to read (almost) every day.

Baby steps back into active blogging, then. Which is not to say that I don’t have ambitions. Over the next month or so, I plan on moving Ouroboros off of wordpress.com to another server – I’ll still use the WordPress software, but I want to have more control over the site’s structure and content. Also I want to open the door to monetizing the site in some way (probably not through ads, but possibly using a donation-based system like Kachingle, whenever that opens up); one of the things that takes me away from blogging is my consulting work, and it would be easier to rationalize spending more time on the blog if I weren’t paying as much of an opportunity cost when I spent time working on it.

Wow. TMI, probably. I’d better go read a paper. See you tomorrow.

 

Sí se puede

Just to follow up on that last post asking you to help the SENS Foundation win $5000 — it worked! SENS came in first, and won the grand prize. The margins were pretty narrow — well below the number of people who visited the contest page from Ouroboros alone — so it can truly be said that every vote counted.

Thanks to the readers of Ouroboros and everyone else who helped SENS over the top.

The amount of money raised is, in the grand scheme, rather small, but it’s possible that the victory for SENS in what amounts to a popularity contest will help increase awareness of the life extension cause.

“I’m immensely grateful to 3banana for involving us in this great opportunity, and to all the SENSF supporters who took the time to leave comments at the site,” said SENS Foundation CSO, Dr Aubrey de Grey. “These supporters have recognised that a public and eloquent expression of broad-based support for our mission has the potential to raise the profile and perceived legitimacy of our work and thereby greatly amplify the impact of the competition itself.”

 

Help raise $5000 for SENS – by leaving an online comment

The SENS Foundation (which organizes the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence conferences) is in the running for the $5000 grand prize in 3banana’s Share to Win event. The contest seeks to raise money “for causes serving unmet needs in health, education and environment.”

And you can help. It’s pretty simple: All you have to do is leave a comment on this page. (The award goes to the cause with the most comments.) You can sign on using a Google account if you already have one of those, or register for a free one-off account. It’s painless and takes about thirty seconds.

Your comment/vote makes a difference! Right now, SENS is neck-and-neck with the competition — as of this post, they’re 17 votes behind first place. (Well, sixteen, since I just commented.) So don’t just sit there — this is your opportunity to help send real money to a very important cause, at no cost to yourself.

Post your comment now.

There are only four days left in the contest, so time is of the essence.

(For all you social media users, feel free to spread the word via blogs and Twitter. If you’re interested in regular updates from the SENS Foundation, there’s a Facebook page as well.)

UPDATE: The push yesterday put SENS into the lead — thanks to all Ouroboros readers who took the time to comment! But the current lead is tenuous, and it could still be lost. If you haven’t commented yet: it doesn’t take much time, and with margins like these your vote really makes a difference. Would you really want to find out that SENS had lost by a single vote? Please consider taking a minute or so and leaving a comment on the contest page.

 

Back from the dead

Ouroboros has been slumbering for the past couple of months — this was for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with the editor’s other professional obligations. Apologies for the absence.

We’re back, starting with on-site coverage of an exciting conference. Posts about the biogerontology literature will resume next week.

We’ll also be looking for more scientist-writers to help us cover the literature. If you’re interested, see here.

 

Why We Blog

A couple of months ago I lamented that scientific blogging would probably be unable to serve as an effective “filter” for the scientific literature. Scientists struggle to keep up with the literature in their own field (let alone related fields), and it would be nice if someone could pre-screen emerging papers in a way that would decrease the time and effort involved in keeping current. For a variety of reasons, I think it’s unlikely that science blogs will be able to serve this function.

But filtering isn’t the only justification for the existence of science blogs, as is made clear by a recent bumper crop of blog posts and articles about science blogging. Blogging can help an individual scientist share ideas with colleagues and spread the word about one’s own work. Some see blogs as increasingly essential to the process of self-promotion, whereas others see an opportunity to fill growing holes in the fabric of conventional science journalism. There is a consensus that blogging is less prestigious than other kinds of scientific publishing, but as participation grows, this may change.

In rough order of the ideas presented in the previous paragraph, I present these pieces here for your delectation:

• It’s good to blog (Nature editorial)
• Is it becoming dangerous to not blog? (Useful Chemistry)
• Scientific blogging: Ignore it and be ignored? (Depth-First)
• Filling the void (Nature editorial)
• Science journalism: Supplanting the old media? (Nature news feature)
• Science Blogging plus/vs Science Journalism (A Blog Around The Clock)
• How to broaden the reach and legitimacy of blogging to practicing scientists (Terra Sigillata)

 

Didn’t this blog used to be about aging?

It hasn’t escaped my attention that one must scroll down quite a ways to find a post about a journal article about the biology of aging. This isn’t intentional, and it doesn’t represent a permanent shift of focus. I just got really sidetracked — I’ve been busy with experiments and group meeting, so I haven’t had a chance to read papers as frequently or deeply as I usually do.

I’ve also been exploring other interests peripherally related to science and aging. Many of these forays have resulted in significant additions to the Feeds and Search links in the right-hand column, but I appreciate that these aren’t very noticeable. Finally, I’ve been thinking about moving Ouroboros off of the wordpress.com server, basically because I’d like more control over the blog’s format, and the research on that subject is taking time.

None of which is a very good excuse. I just wanted to reassure this blog’s faithful reader(s) that I haven’t abandoned biogerontology. More traditional coverage of the field will resume, hopefully with some consistency, next week.

And as always, if you want to help…

 

I am a twit(terer)

I’ve decided to start twittering about biogerontology (mostly; I’ll also be posting about open science, other professional interests, and the occasional personal experience) under the handle DoNotGoGently. I intend this to complement but not replace posting on Ouroboros. In particular, I want to meet two perceived needs:

1. To post interesting articles in a more timely fashion: I tend to put good papers in a list of bookmarks and get to them days or weeks later. By posting on twitter every time I see a good article, I’ll be able to communicate (however briefly) news about interesting work as soon as it crosses my path.

2. To post about articles that I wouldn’t have blogged about: The aging literature is huge and growing; for every ten abstracts I tend to bookmark two and blog about less than one. This way, there’s a greater likelihood that a given article will get some kind of mention.

I may end up adding a Tweet feed to the right-hand margin of the Ouroboros main page, but for now the surest way to follow my tweets is to follow me.

This is an experiment; I’m not yet sure how this is going to work out or how it will influence my blogging, but — hopefully — at the very least it should enable me to clear my “to do” list more rapidly, result in an increase in overall post frequency, and provide another way for interested parties to keep up to date on the latest in the biogerontology literature.

Update: I did in fact add a Twitter feed to the right-hand margin of the main page, but I hate it — wordpress.com doesn’t support any of Twitter’s widgets and I had to add it as an RSS feed in which all text appears as a link. I didn’t want to put it higher up than my other feed links, or my links to journals etc., so it’s quite low on the page — where no one is going to see it. Someday I’ll move to a two-column right hand margin, but that will be after I buy a domain name and strike out on my own, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

 

Help wanted

Every so often, I extend an invitation to interested scientists who might want to volunteer to write for Ouroboros. The last two rounds of invitations have garnered four wonderful contributors (An aged post-doc, lizewen, mikeisnt and turritopsis). We haven’t added anyone in a few months, however, so I thought it might be time to issue another invitation.

Do you want to write for Ouroboros? The three main criteria are as follows:

• Be a working scientist in a field relevant to the biology of aging.
• Have strong English writing skills, and a perfectionist streak about your prose.
• Be willing and able to commit to writing a ~500-word post based on a recent journal article about the biology of aging, around once every two weeks.

Writers tend to converge on subjects that interest them, so it would be nice if you had a sense of what sort of pieces you’d like to cover. Our current contributors are working on calorie restriction, transcriptomics and systems biology, telomeres, and mitochondria — but that leaves a lot of ground un-covered.

Here are some topics I’d love to have someone covering:

• neurodegeneration
• protein degradation and autophagy
• model organisms (e.g., “all worm studies” or “yeast as a model system”)
• cellular senescence
• stem cells
• bioinformatics and genomics

The list isn’t exhaustive; those are just examples. Hopefully your choice of subject would be a subfield in which you have some formal expertise, though that’s not a requirement (clearly, I’m mostly dealing in subjects in which I have no training other than my general biological background).

If you’re interested, let me know via email. How this works: you get in touch, we chat a bit, you submit a ~500-word test article to see how well we work together, and then we go forward from there.

Hope to hear from you soon!

 

Mito Mike

Please welcome our newest contributor, Mike Walsh, who answered the last call for new writers. Mike (mikeisnt is a new graduate student at the UTHSC at San Antonio, where he plans to study mitochondrial dysfunction in brain aging at the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies.

His first post — not surprisingly, on a mitochondrial topic — is up next.