Cool Science Website for fun reading!

Rather than discussing a scientific journal, or talking about research I have done this week, I am going to discuss a scientific website that I found to be very interesting.

On my search for different scientific stories across the web, I stumbled upon http://news.sciencemag.org. Before actually reading any of the articles, I looked for things that would make it a credible website to talk about in a blog post. The website has contact information you can reach the site authors at and has background information. One thing I liked about this website was that you can submit work you have done. I think that is a great way for young researchers to promote their work and get their name out there. I also think this is a great website for college students to go to on their free time and read some of the articles to further educate themselves.

A little preview of some of the articles posted include titles such as: "ScienceShot: Monkey Smiles Are Contagious" by Lizzie Wade to 'Bioethics Panel Gives Yellow Light to Anthrax Vaccine Trial in Children" by Jocelyn Kaiser. There are so many categories you can search and read about from astronomy to genetics. The website also allows readers to live chat and share stories. For example, this article: U.K. Agency Cautiously Endorses Mitochondria Replacement . All I had to do was click "share". Such an easy way to share with your friends or the world.

I hope you all enjoy this website as much as I did!

First post!

So for my first post, I would like to discuss a talk that I had recently done for my communicating biology class here, at SUNY Plattsburgh.
I aquired a journal article while I was a freshman titled, "Effects of Kinship on Territorial Conflicts among Groups of Lions, Panthera Leo", by Goran Spong and Scott Creel. The article attracted to me because I love learning about animals, and I thought a lion would be a cool topic to talk about, so I took that article and used it for my talk. Their hypothesis of the experiment, "Cooperative behavior will be more common among relatives" ultimately revolved around Hamilton's rule. For those who do not know what Hamilton's rule is, it is generally the idea that a species will more likely complete an action if it's benefit times relatedness exceeds its cost. Therefore, the more related a species is to one another, the more likely they will take action. After the authors concluded their experiment they found that the lions response to intruders was influenced by both environmental and social factors, and the degree of relatedness did not affect the decision to approach, nor did it affect behavior during approaches.
Overall i found this to be a very interesting experiment. I would suggest anyone to read this article because it a easy to follow and I learned a lot. The source can be found below if any reader would like to study or learn about the experiment in more detail.

Spong, Goran and Scott Creel. “Effects of kinship

  on territorial conflicts among groups of

  lions, Panthera leo.” Behavioral Ecology

  and Sociobiology 55.4 (2004): 325-331.