Kids book of interest: Antarctic Adventure

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Just found out about this new kids book about Antarctica: Antarctic Adventure. Hat tip to Jeff Hoffman, a friend who has been on many many scientific field adventures.

From the book web site:

Antarctic Adventure is the story of author/scientist Mak Saito's research expedition to the Southern Continent. The book is targeted at children age 3 - 7. Simple text and stunning photographs highlight the adventure elements of fieldwork in the Antarctic (helicopters, snow storms, wildlife). Children learn where Antarctica is, what algae are, what glaciers look like, and the names of several different whales and penguins. More generally, they get a sense of what it means to do scientific fieldwork. A "Dear Reader" section at the end of the book goes into more detail about the expedition's research goals, which involve the importance of algae in global biogeochemical cycles.

I have just bought a copy ... will let people know more when I get it but I am guessing it is going to be good ...

Guest post from Antarctica: Joe Grzymski (@grzymski) on "The Story Behind Nitrogen Cost-Minimization"

Well, this is getting really fun. I have been doing "The Story Behind the Paper" posts for my own papers for a while and recently opened this up to guest posts. And the one today is coming to us from the true wilds - Antarctica. Joe Grzymski (aka @grzymski on Twitter) is out there doing field work (yes, microbiologists have the best field sites ...). For more on the field project see the Desert Research Institute's "Mission Antarctica" site. Joe responded to my request for more guest posts and wrote up a really nice discussion of a recent open access paper of his from the ISME Journal. If anyone else is interesting in writing a guest post on an open access paper or an issue in open access, let me know ... without any further ado -- below is Joe's post

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I thoroughly enjoy reading Jonathan’s posts detailing – far beyond what can possibly be included in published papers – the who, what, where, when, why and how of science. The story behind the potential fourth domain of life article in PLOS ONE provides great detail about how science is done. After reading Matthew Hahn’s insightful history and commentary on his ortholog conjecture paper I was happy to reply to the request for more "stories" and am chiming in from Antarctica (where I am currently doing field research) to discuss the story behind our recent paper in ISME J, "The significance of nitrogen cost minimization in the proteomes of marine microorganisms". I hope it will provide another example of how a lot of science is lost in final, streamlined, published versions. Also, it is work that was largely done by an undergraduate and was vigorously and carefully reviewed – the improvements and expansion of ideas because of great reviewers highlights the best of the review process. What started out as a short two-page paper morphed into a larger piece of research – not things you can properly detail in a manuscript.