PUBLIC MARKS from paleorthid with tag science

Researchers find that soil phosphorus levels may affect plant phytate levels as much as plant breeding. Not only is the phosphorus in low-phytate grain crops more digestible by people, but low-phytate grains free up minerals essential to human nutrition: zinc, manganese and iron.

a resource for people interested in recent advances in Soil Science in all its guises

Wikipedia is the kind of peer-reviewed, information sharing that the scientifically-minded should enthusiastically support

Ever wonder how long it takes to form a paleargid in Wyoming? Ask your soil genesis and morphology questions here and get an answer.

Tell someone you are a soil scientist and it invariably requires an explanation of what you do. It's interesting that few of us do the same things and the telling of it reveals much about the person as well as the community they serve. For that reason I like to collect other folks' descriptions of their work. Certainly the telling of Barry Dutton's life work stands among my favorites because he built his business from scratch in a particularly cost-conscious region. He did it largely without the benefit of the 2 main drivers of regional soil consulting booms: booming suburban sprawl and booming energy prices driving increased well drilling and surface mining for coal and oil shale. I've heard several iterations of Barry's telling over the years and look forward to future installments.

Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most scientists (by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in peer review. It's something that's held "absolutely sacred" in a field where people rarely accept anything with "blind faith," says Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and now CEO of UnitedHealth Europe and board member of PLoS. "It's very unscientific, really." What's wrong with the current system? What could make it better? Does it even work at all? Indeed, an abundance of data from a range of journals suggests peer review does little to improve papers. In one 1998 experiment designed to test what peer review uncovers, researchers intentionally introduced eight errors into a research paper. More than 200 reviewers identified an average of only two errors.

The Washington State Department of Licensing issued a December 2005 sunrise report recommending the licensing of soil scientists.

This exhibit is welcomed with enthusiasm by soil scientists. It would be at any time, but now, when soil science is at the cross roads and with soil scientists keyed up about the profession, it is even more so.

Conner's A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives and 'Low Mechanicks' does for science what Howard Zinn did for American history. It is an altogether winning attempt to tell the story of the ordinary working person or peasant's contribution to our knowledge of the natural world. Just as scholars like Zinn remind us that a slave, Crispus Attucks, was the first casualty of the American Revolution, so does Conner show that humble people were on the front lines of the scientific revolution.

Over the course of an eight-year open-top-chamber CO2-enrichment (to twice ambient concentrations) study of a pristine (annually burned) tallgrass prairie north of Manhattan, Kansas, USA, which was composed of a mixture of C3 and C4 species, Williams et al. measured changes in the active, slow and passive pools of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), with the goal of determining how they were impacted by the doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration of their reasonably long-term experiment.

While the science owes a tremendous debt to agriculturists, engineers and geologists, soil science is not subordinate to any other discipline. Any real disagreement about standing were eliminated in 1924 when the International Council for Science accepted the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS), as a full member , rather than placing soil science within either the IUGS or IUBS.

This article presents results of a survey undertaken as part of a series of work packages under a joint initiative by JISC and SURF to explore the attitudes of authors in the UK and the Netherlands towards Open Access. These and other results seem to reflect a desire on the part of academics to change the balance of rights within copyright between authors and publishers in scholarly communication journals. Libraries and academic institutes are already taking part in the scholarly communication copyright debate and could use these results to align their positions with the academics' views.

The article highlights some important nuances. Terra mulata, the lighter type of terra preta, covers much more area than the celebrated black type central to the concept of terra preta.

comment: heartburn over an expectation that the scientific community has promoted that leads us to believe that we can create a significant, persistent sink of carbon by using established farming and forestry approaches.

The presence of various groups of methane-, propane- and butane-oxidizing micro-organisms can reliably differentiate between prospective and non-prospective areas, as well as between oil and gas reservoirs.

I write at least twice a week about life as we know it and the trials and tribulations of dirt doctoring.

In many states, professional soil scientists conduct the septic system site assessments required for permit approval.

Orange ooze forms where anaerobic waters seep from the ground. This can be a good and natural thing, or it can be due to contamination.

When grazed properly, forage plants in the riparian zone can be stimulated to re-grow and contribute greatly to the health of the ecosystem.