A Cornucopia of Interdiscipline: On ScienceWeek


Add this site to your interdiscipline workout routine, and you'll see rapid results.

Here are the topics covered this week (March 4 edition) by the online magazine ScienceWeek:

• History of Physics: Einstein, Lorentz, and the Ether

• Astrophysics: Star Disks and Planetary Systems

• Cell Biology: On Fast Recovery in Visual Pigments

• Plant Biology: On Movement in the Venus Flytrap

• Medical Biology: Antibiotics and Neurodegenerative Diseases

• Science Policy: On the Cost of Medial Education

The articles are quite different from your typical general audience treatment in journals like Science and C&E News. They usually present the main points brought up in a given article in a normal journal, give some references, and then a related story from previous ScienceWeek editions. From these point-form summaries, you will get a thumbnail sketch of the main questions, why they are important and what new conclusions have been drawn from the work cited. Unlike even the quasi-lay explanations in Science and Nature, these summaries actually explain potentially unfamiliar vocabulary and terms.

As you can see from the list above, ScienceWeek touches on a wide range of subjects. For example, the medical education story contains three stories: the principal one, another titled "Alarm over decline in number of US physician-scientists", and "On the evolution of medical school admissions testing." Each of these stories is about one screen-page long and you can read the main points very efficiently.

My only real problem with ScienceWeek is their annoying habit of using the hopelessly pompous "On..." structure. If you're Darwin, it's okay, otherwise, spare us the "On" and just start with the next word. I find a lot of prissy theory papers in the Journal of Chemical Physics use this "On" junk and I don't like it there either. Obviously your paper will be "On" whatever it is you put in the title. Maybe someone can write a perl script to parse the html and send all the offending "on's" to their rightful home in /dev/null/

Despite the overuse of a certain preposition that will not be named, ScienceWeek is a comprehensive and streamlined ezine that should be considered must-see-TV for those of us who are seeking interdiscipline. You can also subscribe to an email update of the titles. I find that this reminds me to check out the site. Also, I would recommend typing in your favorite subject into their search box to see what you've missed (or written for that matter).

Posted: Tue - March 1, 2005 at 11:05 AM         |

©