Opening a Cabinet of Curiosities in Montreal Readers of this blog must know every summer the GigaScience Press team gathers at the ISMB (International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, where the great and good of computational biology gather for the largest bioinformatics conference of the year.

FUNC on Safari: Functional Metagenomics conference 2024 at Skukuza, Kruger National Park, South Africa (2nd – 5th June 2024) FMG24 participants group photo, taken outside the conference centre at Skukuza rest camp.

I intended for the next post to be a follow-up on the new paper describing the Dry Mesa Haplocanthosaurus, as I hinted/promised in the last post.

This morning saw the publication of my new paper with Colin Boisvert, Brian Curtice, and Ray Wilhite: Boisvert, Colin, Curtice, Brian, Wedel, Mathew, & Wilhite, Ray. 2024. Description of a new specimen of Haplocanthosaurus from the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry.

Another quick photo post from the road. The Tate Museum has a quality in common with the Oxford Museum of Natural History, where the guiding philosophy seems to have been, “Let’s put one of every interesting thing in the world in one big room.” Tucked into a corner is this small assemblage of cast bits of ‘Jimbo’, the Wyoming Supersaurus specimen described by Lovelace et al. (2008).  Here’s a tibia. And a dorsal vertebra.

I gave my keynote talk last evening at the 28th Annual Tate Conference. I also passed out the handout shown above so people could have a handy reference for sauropod biology while I was talking. I have a link to a PDF version at the bottom of this post if you’d prefer it that way. Now that the talk’s done, I’m letting my “abstract” out into the world, here (link) and at the bottom of this post.

In opposition to my speech supporting the motion “the open access movement has failed”, here’s what Jessica Polka said in opposition to the motion. The open access movement has not failed. It is in the process of succeeding. Indeed, over 50% of papers are now open access.

As I noted a week ago, to my enormous surprise I was invited to be one of the two participants in the plenary debate the closes the annual meeting of my long-term nemesis, the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I was to propose the motion “The open access movement has failed” in ten minutes or less, followed by Jessica Polka’s statement against the motion;

1. VARIATION An anatomical variant that shows up in 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 humans is by medical standards pretty common; in a metro area the size of London or Los Angeles you’d expect to find 10,000 or 20,000 people with that variation.

The 9th Women in Science Conference took place in Shenzhen. Below are some highlights from the conference co-organized by our Publishing Director, Laurie Goodman, and Co-Chaired by Doris Yang, from BGI-College.   Today,  March 8, 2024 marks International Women’s Day – where women’s achievement and inclusivity is celebrated.