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Red fish, blue fish, Brainbow fish!

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Woods Hole Images round 3 – vote for a Development cover

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Interview with the BSDB Poster winner Aditya Saxena

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Gone today, hair tomorrow? Changes in dermal papilla cell number drive hair thinning and loss.

Goodbye!

Posted by on February 21st, 2013

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Today was my last day as Community Manager for the Node, so this is goodbye from me!

I’ve had a great time these past three years, setting up the site and learning what’s of interest to the developmental biology community.

My favourite part of the job was meeting people in person at conferences and lab visits. It’s difficult to assess exactly how people view the Node from over here in the Cambridge office. Site statistics only tell you so much. But when, two months after launching the Node, two guys walked up to our booth at the SDB meeting in Albuquerque to photograph each other in front of the Node banner, that meant so much more than some anonymous numbers! (I never did get to see those photos. Any leads welcome!)

The more conferences I went to, the more I ran into people who already knew about the Node. Someone told me they saw a poster in their department. Someone else had heard about it at an SDB regional meeting. I’d never been to that department, or to any regional meeting, so that meant that people were spreading the word! And indeed, when we ran a survey in 2011, and asked people how they found out about the Node, “word of mouth” was the second-most popular answer. That, to me, was definitely the best part of the job. A community website is not something you can just build and wait for people to use. The community itself is more important than the technology, and you’ve all been such a great community!


BSDB meeting 2011


Other personal highlights:
-Speaking of community: the 2011 worm meeting. I’m not a worm researcher by any stretch of the imagination, but they were so welcoming!
-Interviewing Jorge Cham of PhD comics. Twice.
-Going viral on Twitter
-Finding people who moved to careers outside academic research, and writing a piece about it for Development.
-Getting Node fan art! (It’s staying in the office, but I’ve got photos!)


The most challenging thing these past few years has been to get across the nature of the Node: people often expected me to update the Node with news relevant to the community, but that is actually something that you should be doing. The Node is meant as a platform for and by developmental biologists, and I’m not one. I was just here to help you find your way. There are currently over 800 people with active Node accounts, who can at any given time post anything they want to the site, without having to ask anyone for permission. It will be a few months until the next Community Manager starts, so I hope that you’ll keep the site filled with interesting things!

I’ll be following along from a distance. A few projects that I started will go live on the site soon. I’m very excited about the next round of Woods Hole images (which I’ve already seen, and which are amazing!) and I’m also looking forward to seeing the first journal club post go up soon!

Thanks to everyone I worked with these past three years – from editors to society staff and from students to lab heads. You’ve all been amazing, and I can’t wait to see where you’re taking the Node next!

If you’d like to stay in touch, you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter (where my username, @easternblot, reveals my true nature as a biochemist…). I’m moving on to another job that involves a lot of interaction with researchers, in all life sciences, so I hope to see some of you again!
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Node survey results

Posted by on October 5th, 2011

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A few months ago we ran a survey on the Node to ask how you used the site, and if you had any suggestions. First of all, a big thank-you to all of you who took the time to answer our questions. As promised, we held a random draw among the survey participants: the winner was Gregory Shanower and he has been sent some gifts from Development and the Node. Congratulations!

So what did the survey tell us?

The complete report is 13 pages long. We’ll spare you that, but there were some recurring themes that we thought you might be interested in, so here is a short summary of the results – just to give you a brief idea of what we’ll be focusing on in the near future:

Who is reading the Node?
Let’s start by shattering a myth. One of the biggest misconceptions about the Node is that it’s “only for young people”. We hear this comment regularly but we now have the data to prove that it is not true. As the pie chart below shows, there is an equal distribution of PhD students, postdocs and PIs reading the Node. (Considering that in absolute numbers there are far more PhD students and postdocs than there are PIs, this means that, relatively speaking, the Node seems to be more popular among PIs than among younger researchers!)



Other facts about you, the Node’s readers:
* Almost 90% of the Node audience identifies as developmental biologists, but many also have interests in cell biology, genetics, stem cell research, or other areas of the life sciences.
* One in four Node readers has heard about the Node from a friend or colleague. Thank you for talking about us!

What are the most popular features on the Node?
Aside from the main content on the Node, the job postings and event listings are the most popular features. This is as good a place as any to remind everyone that you can add jobs and events if you have a Node account. You’ll receive posting instructions once your account is approved. Speaking of which…

Writing for the Node
About a third of the survey respondents has written posts or comments on the Node, posted job ads, or added events. Almost as many people indicated that they had not written anything on the Node, but would like to write something.

Of the people who had never posted on the Node, some said they didn’t have time, or that they were not confident about making their opinions public. Many others simply didn’t know what to write about, or didn’t know that they could, so we’ll be doing a bit more in the future to make it clear that anyone can post and we’ll try to set up a resource (perhaps an opt-in mailing list) to offer topics and ideas for Node posts for enthusiastic (current and future) Node contributors who suffer from writers block.

Keeping up with the Node
One of the most striking things that we found in the survey is that a lot of you are simply not able to keep up with everything on the Node, and more than half of you simply scroll through posts on the homepage. One immediate solution is that we’ll start doing monthly summary posts, highlighting some of the content from earlier that month. Here is the first one, for September 2011. We’ll also see if there is anything we can do in terms of layout and presentation, but that will be a more long-term plan.

Topics
Finally, we received a lot of great suggestions for features and for topics for future Node posts, and we’ll try to get as many of those on the site as we can. (Of course everything depends on people actually writing content, so it’s ultimately up to you.)

Several people made a suggestion that was quite straightforward and that we’ve already started in response to these suggestions: to do regular round-ups of upcoming deadlines for meetings, scholarships or grants. It’s hard to ensure such updates are complete, so if you see one of these posts and know of another deadline, feel free to post it yourself, or leave a comment on a previous deadline post. You don’t need an account to comment, and your email address will never be public.

If you have any questions about the survey we ran, or if you have some additional suggestions for the Node, feel free to leave a comment below.
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Site update and dates for your calendar

Posted by on September 15th, 2011

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Scheduled Node Maintenance:

This weekend (September 16-18) we’re upgrading the system that the Node runs on (WordPress), so you may not be able to access the site at times. Everything should be working again on Monday, but as always, if you spot anything unusual, let us know.

Update 18/9: the site upgrade is now complete, and everything works - as far as we can tell (again, do let us know if something seems weird.)

Dates for your calendar
In the recent survey about the Node, a few people asked to be kept up to date of various scholarships and registration deadlines. Here is a selection of upcoming dates of interest, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. We’ll try to do these once in a while, but don’t hesitate to write your own posts to let people know about similar deadlines, or leave a comment below. Also make sure to check the eligibility of all scholarships and grants before applying.

Conference registration deadlines.
Keystone announced a few upcoming deadlines for conference abstract submissions, including dates for the following meetings:
September 19 – abstract & scholarship deadline for “Angiogenesis: Advances in Basic Science and Therapeutic Applications” (January 16-21, 2012)
September 20 – abstract & scholarship deadline for “Epigenomics” joint with “Chromatin Dynamics” (January 17-22, 2012)
September 21 – abstract & scholarship deadline for “Cardiovascular Development and Regeneration” (January 22-27, 2012)
October 6 - abstract & scholarship deadline for “Gene silencing by small RNAs” (February 7-12, 2012)

Grants and fellowships:
October 11 - The NSF announced an application deadline of October 11 for Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB). For 2012 this fellowship is limited to certain areas: (1) Broadening Participation in Biology; (2) Intersections of Biology and Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and (3) National Plant Genome Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellowships.
November 1 – Sir Henry Wellcome PostDoctoral Fellowships. See their website for other grant deadlines.
November 18 – NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

Travel funding:
September 30 – Deadline for The Company of Biologists Direct Travel grants, which fund travel for conference attendance.
October 31 - EDEN has research exchange funds available for US-based eco-evo-devo researchers (graduate students, postdocs, faculty).
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Keeping up with the Node

Posted by on December 6th, 2010

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Like more than 500 million people in the world, the Node is now on Facebook . Our foray into Facebook was slightly overshadowed by the British royal family doing exactly the same thing a few weeks earlier, but we can guarantee you that our page will contain far more developmental biology.

We’re using our Facebook page much like our Twitter account: to notify you of new Node posts, and other brief bits of community news. Have a look , “like” us, and invite your friends and labmates to do the same. (We’ll still be updating Twitter as well, so don’t worry if you’re used to seeing us on there.)

There’s a link to our new Facebook page in the left sidebar, and the eagle-eyed among you may have spotted another new thing over there. Several people have told us that they couldn’t immediately figure out what the Node was when they arrived on the page for the first time, so we’ve tried to explain it very briefly over there.

Finally, some things are better left unchanged, it seems. We asked you whether you would like a change in the format of the e-mail notifications, and as it turns out, almost half of those that took the poll were satisfied with the current format. Good to know! Needless to say, we didn’t change the e-mail format.
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the Node update – Jobs

Posted by on September 7th, 2010

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New format for job postings
You may have noticed some job ads for postdocs appearing on the Node. Until today, these ads appeared with the rest of the posts, but we now changed how job ads are displayed on the Node, to make them stand out from the rest of the content. This makes it easier for people who are looking for jobs to find the ads, and less intrusive for those who aren’t looking for work.

Job ads no longer appear in the main body of the site, with the rest of the posts, but are accessible in three other ways;
-The three most recently posted ads are listed by title in the sidebar (between “recent comments” and “events”) on all pages of the Node. They can also be accessed from the archive in the sidebar
-The Jobs category lists all job ads
-Jobs have their own RSS feed, which can be reached from the page containing all the different feeds on the Node. If you want to receive both regular Node content and job ads, you need to subscribe to both feeds.

Adding an announcement for a job opening in your lab works exactly the same as writing a post. Make sure that you have the title field filled in, and that you select the category “Jobs”. Job postings don’t show up in the main body of the site, but in the sidebar only. There is also a separate RSS feed for job postings.
(The previous paragraph has also been added to the e-mail that new authors receive.)

Finally, the Help page has been updated to reflect these changes.

E-mail updates about the Node
Currently, e-mail updates about new Node posts arrive as a “daily digest”, and will probably still include job ads. It’s also possible to set these updates to occur after every post (which is approximately once per day at the moment anyway) and have users select which categories they would like to receive in e-mail. In that case, if you only want e-mail notifications of interviews, or everything except job ads, you can change those settings.
The choice between digest or per-post cannot be made at the individual user level, unfortunately, so we have to make one decision for everyone. Let us know please, in the comments, what you would like: the option to select which categories to receive in e-mail, OR the daily digest. (In both cases, you have the option to turn notifications off entirely through the WordPress dashboard.)
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Some tips for reading the Node

Posted by on July 14th, 2010

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The Node has been officially live for almost four weeks now, and we’ve seen visitor numbers and registrations go steadily up. As with most websites, there are far more silent readers than people who are actively writing, so here are a few tips on keeping up to date with the Node:

If you don’t want to miss a single post, the easiest thing to do is sign up for our e-mail alerts. They currently go out once a day if there was at least one new post that day. If you are a registered user of the Node, you can also change your e-mail settings to only receive certain categories. For example, if you just want to read news and no interviews, or only want meeting reports and don’t care about career posts, you can customize all that, so you’re  only sent the information that you’re interested in.

Another way to read the Node is by RSS. Not everyone we talked to knows how to use this, so here’s a brief explanation: RSS feeds are a useful way to keep track of sites that update regularly, such as blogs or scientific journals or news websites. (The best explanation of RSS is probably this video). Websites that have an RSS feed will usually have a little icon like the one pictured here somewhere on the site, or next to the url in your browser’s address bar. To read RSS feeds, you need a feed reader. Google has one that’s free to use from within your web browser (so you don’t need to download anything). It works a bit like an e-mail program: every time you visit your feed reader, you’ll see which websites have updated since you last looked. Most journals use RSS feeds as well, and the four table of contents that we show in the Node sidebar to the right are in fact the RSS feeds of these journals. If you follow a lot of regularly updated websites (journals, blogs, the Node, news websites) and don’t want their updates to clutter your e-mail inbox, give it a try! The Node has feeds for some subsections of the site as well as a feed for everything, so you can pick what you want to read from our RSS page.

Finally, you can of course still visit the Node website the old fashioned way. In fact, you’re getting a lot more out of it if you do! You can see the list of events, use the links in the sidebar, see the journal table of contents, read people’s comments, and if you feel like it, you can leave a comment yourself: Anyone can comment on the Node, even without an account, but we do ask that you fill out your e-mail address. Leaving your e-mail address is just a safety measure to prevent abuse of the comment feature, and the address is not displayed on the site.

If you have any other questions about reading the Node, let us know, either in the comments or via e-mail.
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The Node Launch Party

Posted by on July 6th, 2010

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Yes, we’ve been live for a few weeks, but you’re not truly and fully launched as a website these days without a proper launch party, so we had ours last night in Cambridge (UK).

The Gurdon Institute was kind enough to open their doors to us, and we invited all of their labs as well as other local developmental biologists to join The Company of Biologists and Development for some celebratory champagne and canapés. We were also joined by representatives from the Journal of Cell Science, Nature Cell Biology, PLoS Biology, F1000/The Scientist, and Nature Network Cambridge.

With the Node projected on screen, and three laptops available to browse the site, we had a unique chance to show people around the site in person, and got some useful feedback and suggestions as well.

Several people registered on the Node during or after last night’s event. Welcome! We hope you (and all other new registrants) will use the Node to read and share, and that you had a good time yesterday!

Now the party is over, the leftover canapés have been consumed by our colleagues back at the office, and it’s back to regularly scheduled Node posting and reading. The sad thing about launching is that you can do it only once!


The Company of Biologists’ publisher Claire Moulton, with Company directors and Cambridge researchers John Gurdon and Daniel St Johnston.
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Welcome to the Node – a virtual coffee break

Posted by on June 14th, 2010

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On one of the walls of the Royal Institution in London is the following quote:

“Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break” – Earl Wilson



Coffee breaks are not just a good source of information in office communication, but also in science communication. In the mid-nineties, Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist organized a conference for artists and scientists in which the entire conference program was replaced with one big coffee break. He had noticed that at a conference, the interesting discussion happen during the coffee breaks – not necessarily at the presentations themselves.

We’d like you to think of the Node as a way to spend your coffee breaks. As you’re reading papers or doing experiments, you learn a lot about the science of developmental biology, but not so much about the scientists. To get the latest news about funding or hear which meeting you might want to attend next, to find out the day-to-day practices of other labs or hear some entertaining stories from the field, you need to get up from behind the bench and talk to people. With the Node, you don’t even have to get up anymore: you can roll your chair over to your laptop, and visit the site. Once you’re all caught up and ready to get back to work, you can catch up on recent papers using the table of contents of developmental biology journals listed in the sidebar.

As with any coffee break conversation, you’re not just listening to others speaking, but you can have your say as well. If you create an account on the Node, we’ll then make you an author of the site, and you can add you own posts. Have a look at the help page for more information, and feel free to ask us any questions.
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Welcome to the Node

Posted by on April 1st, 2010

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Welcome to the Node! This is a place for developmental biologists to share the latest news, discuss topics related to their field, and see what’s new.

This site is managed by the journal Development, but the content is written by a variety of contributors. That could include you! If you have anything to share with the developmental biology community and want to participate in the discussions, sign up for an account.

You can subscribe to posts by e-mail or RSS, but remember to visit the site to comment on posts. You can also follow the Node on Twitter, or read more about us on the “About” page.

Have a look around, participate, and let us know what you think – either in the comments or by e-mail.
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