PLOS Blogs Network

This Week in PLOS Medicine: Iron Supplements during Pregnancy; Male-Male Consensual Sex, Sexual Violence, & HIV in South Africa; & Malaria Surveillance

PLOS Medicine — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:15:34 +0000

This week PLOS Medicine publishes the following new articles:

Compared to twice weekly iron supplements, daily iron supplements for pregnant women do not provide any benefits in birth weight or improved infant growth, according to a community-based cluster randomized trial …

What Is the Health Impact of Fracking?

Jason Silverstein — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:59:20 +0000

Does fracking impact health? It’s a question that some want to answer before projects begin. After all, we know pipelines have caused massive damage before. Since 1993, there have been 5,613 significant pipeline incidents that cut short 367 lives. Ten …

Mind the Brain Podcast Episode 02: The Neuroscience of Music – Anticipation and Reward

Ruchir Shah — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:17:26 +0000

For the second in my neuroscience podcast series, I chat with Robert Zatorre, who is a Professor in the Department of Neurology at McGill University. His lab studies the function of our auditory systems, in the context of complex cognitive …

Exploring multiple facets of modern men’s health

Raquel Laura Iglesias — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:03:30 +0000

June is Men’s Health Month! This is a time to bring awareness to preventable health issues and encourage early detection of diseases affecting men. As we wind down from celebrating Father’s Day this past weekend, here are a few …

Announcing ALM Reports – a new tool for analyzing Article Impact

Liz Allen — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:53:45 +0000

PLOS is a leader in transforming research communication through Open Access and we are also committed to improving the evaluation of research through Article Level Metrics (ALM) that measure impact at the article (not the journal) level.

Today, we are …

Ruby on Rails: Too Simple, or Just Simple Enough?

John Callaway — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:47:53 +0000

PLOS recently launched ALM Reports, implemented as a Ruby on Rails (RoR) app. I’m one of two engineers who implemented this site. I’m not going to say too much about the functional aspects of the app, other than that …

Risk of thrombosis: Another reason to avoid sitting?

Travis Saunders, MSc, CEP — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:00:02 +0000

Today’s guest post comes from PhD student Bethany Howard. You can find out more about Bethany at the bottom of this post. The study that she is discussing was recently published in MSSE, and can be found here. We …

Repost: The Pay-for-Delay Tactic

Jessica Wapner — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 01:25:29 +0000

Today, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Federal Trade Commission in its lawsuit against Actavis over so-called pay-for-delay tactics (PDF of Opinion). That is, paying money to a generic manufacturer to delay production of a drug …

How to Find a Fossil

Shaena Montanari — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:34:47 +0000

Since the summer is the field season for many of us, I thought I would write a little bit about the first step in paleontological discovery: actually going out and looking for fossils. I will admit, when I first started …

Book Review: The Recession Hurt Many People, Now Austerity is Hurting More

PLOS Guest Blogger — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:19:05 +0000

Jean Adams from Newcastle University, UK reviews “The Body Economic: why austerity kills” by David Stuckler & Sanjay Basu

In early 2009, a few short months after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, an interesting debate broke out on the Health …