The WNBA wrapped up its biggest season ever last month with eye-popping TV ratings, robust ticket sales and record revenue. Now, everybody wants in on the action.

The trio of 76ers' stars looked majestic on opening night as their images covered the arena's 4K kinetic scoreboard. Joel Embiid palmed a basketball. Tyrese Maxey in the middle appeared ready to burst off the screen for a dunk. Paul George looked fierce as he squeezed a basketball with both hands.

Alperen Sengun scored 27 points for a second straight game and added 17 rebounds, leading the Houston Rockets to a 107-92 win over the Washington Wizards on Monday night.

Joel Embiid stuck around for extra work after shootaround. The 7-footer who has yet to officially step on the court for the Philadelphia 76ers this season was in no rush to finish his drills.

The Food and Drug Administration could put a stop to the use of phenylephrine, an ingredient in over-the-counter nasal decongestants, because its studies found it doesn't work.

A jury awarded more than $12 million Friday to a woman who lost her job at a Michigan insurance company after declining to get a COVID-19 vaccination.

After working at a crowded and dangerous internment camp in Iraq, Air Force Staff Sgt. Heather O'Brien returned to the U.S. with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The World Health Organization said mpox cases in the region of Congo where a new and more infectious variant was first detected appear to be "plateauing," even as the virus continues to increase in other regions of the country, as well as in Burundi and Uganda.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pushing President-elect Donald Trump to crack down on fluoride levels in drinking water, saying the mineral can lead to unintended medical problems -- and setting up a clash with medical experts who defend it as a proven way to fighting cavities.

When opponents of Idaho's strict abortion law said it was forcing women to be emergency-airlifted out of state to have their pregnancies terminated, it shocked the Supreme Court. Now Idaho says the claim is not true.

Worsening air pollution sickened an estimated 1.8 million people in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province in the past month, health officials said Tuesday, as schools across the province were ordered to close for five days to protect children's health.

Two former Olympic champions are in the race to be the next IOC president. So is a prince of a Middle East kingdom and the son of a former president. The global leaders of cycling, gymnastics and skiing also are in play.

Four-time Grand Prix series medalist Rika Kihira will miss the upcoming figure skating season because of a stress fracture in her right ankle that has not fully healed, the Japanese star announced Wednesday.

Not long after Edwin Moses figured out how to attack the solution to track's ultimate math problem, he transformed himself into the best hurdler in history.

In his first visit back to Utah since awarding Salt Lake City the 2034 Winter Games, the International Olympic Committee president sought to ease worries that the city could lose its second Olympics if organizers don't fulfill an agreement to play peacemaker between anti-doping authorities.

Simone Biles simply wanted to mix it up when the gymnastics superstar invited some of the top American men to join her post-Olympic Tour.

He's been tough on Russia, led the charge to put prize money in the pockets of athletes and pushed for a definitive but much-derided resolution in the longstanding debate over transgender athletes.

Yannic Seidenberg, who won the silver medal with the German men's hockey team at the 2018 Olympics, has had his doping ban cut by 18 months.

American figure skater Ilia Malinin has been doing gymnastics off the ice much of his life, one of the many reasons why he can so effortlessly land the dazzling quadruple jumps that made him a world champion at just 19 years old last March.

French authorities said Friday they have charged seven individuals in connection with a cyberbullying campaign targeting Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the Paris Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies.

USA Track and Field is bringing the U.S. Paralympics Track & Field program in-house beginning Jan. 1 as part of a partnership that will unite all of its athletes under one roof.

Olympic silver medalist race walker Koki Ikeda of Japan has been provisionally banned for suspected blood doping, track and field's Athletics Integrity Unit said on Friday.

Paris's Notre Dame cathedral, whose historic bells were silenced following 2019's devastating fire, will soon echo again with fresh chimes.

The Canadian Soccer Association says an independent review confirmed the Paris Olympics drone-spying scandal was not an isolated misstep.

Former Duke star Kyle Singler's cryptic Instagram post saying he fears for his life has drawn an outpouring of concern and support from former teammates and others.

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked a state law that would require classrooms in Louisiana to post the Ten Commandments starting in January.

Maya Lopez returns in a 5-episode limited event series

The post Now Streaming: Marvel’s Echo first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Varada Sethu is joining the TARDIS alongside Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson for the Fifteenth Doctor's second season of adventures.

The post Doctor Who Is Getting A New Companion For 2025 first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Apple TV+'s adaptation of the books by Hugh Howey has a good four seasons in it, producers say.

The post Here’s How Long Apple’s Silo Show Could Run first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Netflix has renewed The Witcher for what will be its final year, with Liam Hemsworth taking over the show's lead role from Henry Cavill.

The post The Witcher Ending With Season Five first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Season 2 of the sci-fi thriller premieres on TNT in the United States on Sunday, June 9. But there's a catch.

The post Is The Lazarus Project Coming Back? first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Sauron continues his devastating rise to power in the new season, arriving globally this summer on Prime Video.

The post The Rings of Power Premieres This August (Watch The New Trailer!) first appeared on SciFi Stream.

The prequel series will chronicle the rise of the Bene Gesserit order thousands of years before Paul Atreides.

The post First Look At Dune: Prophecy, The Spin-Off TV Series Coming To Max first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Disney+ has ordered a new series for the Marvel character, picking up where WandaVision left off.

The post Vision Is Getting His Own Show, From Star Trek’s Terry Matalas first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Zur Unterstützung der Beteiligung des MfN an EU BON ist am Museum für Naturkunde Berlin zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt eine vorerst auf 2 Jahre befristete (mit der Option der Verlängerung)
Position eines/einer Wissenschaftlichen Mitarbeiters/in mit 75% der regelmäßigen wöchentlichen Arbeitszeit Entgeltgruppe E13 TV-L Berlin zu besetzen
Aufgabengebiete:
Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeit und eigenständige Durchführung spezifischer Aufgaben innerhalb des EU BON Projektes, vor allem innerhalb der Arbeitspakete 1 (Datenquellen) und 2 (Datenintegration), i.b.
- Datenrecherche und Erstellung von Übersichten für EU BON relevanter Daten- und Informationsquellen;
- Bewertung und Lückenanalyse bestehender Datenbanken und Informationssysteme zur Biodiversität;
- Harmonisierung, Aktualisierung und Koordinierung taxonomischer Referenz-Datenbanken i.b. für Europa;
- Unterstützung der Einführung und Verbesserung von Datenstandards zur Verbesserung der Integration und Interoperabilität unterschiedlicher Datenebenen
- Mitwirkung bei Erprobung neuer Datenerhebungsansätze und –verfahren, auch im Gelände
- Planung und Durchführung von Projekttreffen und -veranstaltungen
- Erstellung von Ergebnisberichten und wissenschaftlichen Präsentationen / Veröffentlichungen.

A new "LinkOut" feature introduced by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) NCBI’s allows the easy linking to content on PubMed and GenBank.  Dryad has already introduced the feature benefitting from easy and fast linking of associated content to the two resources.

PubMed and GenBank, from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), are hugely popular resources for searching and retrieving article abstracts and nucleotide sequence data, respectively.  PubMed indexes the vast majority of the biomedical literature, and deposition of nucleotide sequences in GenBank or one of the other INSDC databases is a near universal requirement for publication in a scientific journal. LinkOut allows the data from an article to be distributed among repositories without compromising its discoverability.

Dryad, intends to expand on this feature in a couple of ways. First, it is planned to make Dryad content searchable via the PubMed and GenBank identifiers, which because of their wide use will provide a convenient gateway for other biomedical databases to link out to Dryad.  Second, open web standards will be used to expose relationships between content in Dryad and other repositories, not just NCBI.

Original source: Dryad news and views

One year of experience and perspectives for the future from Pensoft Publishers and GBIF

In 2012 GBIF and Pensoft pioneered a workflow between the GBIF’s Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) and Pensoft’s journals ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, Nature Conservation, etc. to automatically export metadata into the form of a data paper manuscript, based on the Ecological Metadata Language (EML). One year on they share their experience and perspectives for the future of data publishing.

In its essence, a Data Paper is a scholarly journal publication whose primary purpose is to describe a dataset or a group of datasets, rather than to report a research investigation. As such, it contains facts about data, not hypotheses and arguments in support of the data, as found in a conventional research article. The future of data publishing according to Pensoft Publishers and GBIF, lies in the elaborating of formats for descriptions of various kinds of data (ecological, morphological, genomic, environmental, etc.), as well as in linking to various platforms (GBIF, Scratchpads, Dryad, EDIT, CBOL, etc.).

More about the collaboration and experience of Pensoft Publishers and GBIF learn from their joint poster available here.

The first meeting of Work Package 5 (EU BON testing and validation of concepts, tools, and services) was held between 2^nd and 4^th April, 2013 in the Doñana Biological Station, in Spain. 23 people from 10 different institutions (7 of the EU BON consortium) worked towards building a draft on Principles and Guidelines for establishing and operating EU BON test sites.

During the meeting the members agreed on starting documenting each of the sites, using a common format to be decided in May on the Informatics Task Force meeting of WP2 (Data integration and interoperability) in Norway. A data inventory will also be built in each of the sites, adding monitoring protocols in stepwise fashion.

In addition the meeting served to get a better view of the variety of Ecosystems in Doñana as well as the monitoring protocols that are being conducted in this area. 

The European Commission adopted a new strategy for encouraging the use of green infrastructure, and for ensuring that the enhancement of natural processes becomes a systematic part of spatial planning. Green Infrastructure is a tried and tested tool that uses nature to provide ecological, economic and social benefits. Instead of building flood protection infrastructure, for example, a green infrastructure solution would be to allow a natural wetland to absorb the excess water from heavy rain.

Green infrastructure is often cheaper and more durable than alternatives provided through conventional civil engineering. Biodiversity-rich parks, green spaces and fresh air corridors can for example mitigate the negative effects of summer heat waves. In addition to the health and environmental benefits, green infrastructure also brings multiple social benefits: it creates jobs and makes cities more appealing places to live and work. And it allows for wildlife to thrive, even in an urban context.

Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik said: "Building green infrastructure is often a good investment for nature, for the economy and for jobs. We should provide society with solutions that work with nature instead of against it, where that makes economic and environmental sense."

More about the EC Green Infrastructure here: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/ecosystems/index_en.htm

Science for Environment Policy features a policy brief explaining the biases around biodiversity databases in their latest issue 331, from 6 June 2013. "Biodiversity databases: language and location help explain biases" features a new study arguing that low numbers of English speakers, large distances from the database host and low security acting as key barriers to data collection and among the main reasons for the underrepresentation of some countries in biodiversity databases.

Source: Amano T., Sutherland W.J. (2013) Four barriers to the global understanding of biodiversity conservation: wealth, language, geographical location and security. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 280: 20122649. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2649

The EUBrazilOpenBio project  announces two new training tools as a part of its e-training Programme aiming at educating and enabling current and potential users of EUBrazilOpenBio to unlock new knowledge and shape effective policy on biodiversity challenges. The new tools cover the following use cases: Ecological Niche Modeling and Cross-mapping.

The EUBrazilOpenBio anytime, anywhere eTraining tools are designed for researchers in the spheres of Biodiversity, Life science, Climate Change, application Developers as well as regulatory authorities and policy decision-makers.

EUBrazilOpenBio is focused on tackling the complexity of biodiversity science such as the diversity of multidisciplinary datasets spanning from climatology to earth sciences by integrating advanced computing resources with data sources across Europe and Brazil.

For more informationand to try out the new tools click here.

The Brazilian initiative PPBio (The Program for Research on Biodiversity) launches a new book based on over a decade of experience in implementing the biodiversity monitoring system RAPELD in the Brazilian Amazon. Richly illustrated and written in simple language, the book "Biodiversity and Integrated Environmental Monitoring" addresses the issues that led to the system development, covering topics such as the spatial organization and representation of biological diversity, environmental monitoring, and data management.

Monitoring of biodiversity is not merely an academic endeavor. Although scientific aspects such as representation of biodiversity and biodiversity data integration, management and preservation are of a great importance, it is also essential to think about the political context in which decisions will be made and how to incorporate political stakeholders and decision makers.

"As this important book makes clear questions about biodiversity are far from purely scientific. Biodiversity matters. Our needs to assess it embed in a complex of questions posed by managers, policy makers and those who live in or otherwise benefit from biodiversity.",  explains Dr Stuart L. Pimm in the preface of the book. "So how do we ensure that data collected now will be useful for purposes we cannot yet imagine at some unexpected time in the future? Or provide comparison to some other place that we might survey some day?"

Those and many more questions regarding biodiversity data management and policy involvement are discussed in the new book "Biodiversity and Integrated Environmental Monitoring".

The University of Cambridge invites for applications for a Research Associate to work on EU-BON, a major EU-funded research project seeking to improve the use of biodiversity data in public policy.

Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant social science or conservation science. Experience in both qualitative and quantitative analysis is desirable. Applicants should ideally have some first-hand experience of public policy processes and a willingness to travel within the European Union for research. Excellent organisational and communication skills will be essential in working as a successful part of this large, multi-partner and multinational team.

The researcher will carry out research on how biodiversity data is currently used in European policy making and will contribute to analysis of the opportunities to increase its effective provision and use. Research methods are likely to combine qualitative and quantitate analysis and to focus on the use of biodiversity data in public policy contexts. It is expected that some of the research will take place in Brussels. The researcher will have considerable freedom in defining the research project in discussion with Dr Doubleday and Prof Sutherland. In addition to carrying out research on the use of biodiversity data in European policy making, the researcher will support Cambridge's contribution to EU BON as a whole. This will involve contributing to other workpackages as and when required. More information about EU BON can be found here: http://www.eubon.eu

Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available for 36 months in the first instance.

Completed applications consisting of a CHRIS/6 (Parts I & III) (downloadable from http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/hr/forms/chris6/) a covering letter, and CV, should be sent to Danielle Feger, via email: geogrec@hermes.cam.ac.uk or sent to Research Administrator, Department of Geography, Downing Site, Cambridge, CB2 3EN

Please quote reference LC01355 on your application and in any correspondence about this vacancy.

Any enquiries concerning the position can be made to Dr Robert Doubleday, rob.doubleday@csap.cam.ac.uk

For more information about the position, please visit: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/1611/

Policy-makers and science and industry representatives are discussing how to make large amounts of Earth observation data accessible to a wider user community. To explore this idea, some 250 science, industry and policy-making representatives and national delegates from Europe, the US, Australia, China and Africa met at ESA’s ESRIN centre in Frascati, Italy last week for ESA’s first ‘Big Data from Space’ event.

Representatives from ESA and NASA opened the event together with the European Commission. European Commission Directorates-General for Enterprise and Industry, Research and Innovation and Communications Networks, Content and Technology, along with representatives from the European Environment Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Open Geospatial Consortium acted as session chairs. 

Javier de la Torre, representing the EU BON partner Vizzuality gave a presentation 'Global Deforestation through Timeme: Big Data Meets Scalable Visualizations,' which included some of the work Vizzuality is doing toward the EUBON project.

The event concluded with a strong call by all parties for the ability to handle and use big Earth observing data. This could potentially open new opportunities for research and international cooperation schemes such as programmatic and industrial coordination.

In 2013, the University of Potsdam will host the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The meeting (www.gfoe-2013.de) will take place from September 9 to 13, 2013 in Potsdam, Germany.

The guiding theme of the 43rd Annual Meeting is "Building bridges in ecology - linking systems, scales and disciplines".
Along the lines of this guiding theme, we will stimulate scientific discussions about all aspects in basic and applied ecological research contributing to better connect.

At the Bioinformatics Horizon 2013 Conference (3 - 6 September 2013, Rome) a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between PESI and EU BON. Christoph Häuser, on behalf of EU BON and Yde de Jong on behalf of PESI (see picture below), signed the document to strengthen the cooperation and formalise the integrating efforts of the European species infrastructures.  

PESI is now a new associate partner of EU BON, a consortium with currently 30 partners from 18 countries. One of the common aims of EU BON and PESI will be to establish and sustain standard taxonomies for Europe.  EU BON will support the PESI backbone developments, including its components, with a focus on Fauna Europaea and Euro+Med. Besides analyzing current gaps, new ideas will be developed to trigger expert involvement and enhance the data management systems.

In a side-meeting at BIH 2013, some ideas were discussed with available EU BON and PESI partners. Important steps will be taken to secure the sustainability of databases and expertise networks combined with the development of technical innovations for users and stakeholders and to promote the implementation of PESI as a European (INSPIRE) standard. It will be also important to further integrate the huge expertise networks, outreach to PESI Focal Points and expand the geographical scope. Furthermore, it will be important to integrate additional data types and data-resources.

The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren (Belgium) is part of the FishBase Consortium and responsible for the information on the fresh- and brackish water fishes of Africa. Through an agreement with the Belgian Development Cooperation and as part of the FishBase programme, the RMCA has five grants available for a 3-month training programme in the use of FishBase and the taxonomy of African fishes.

The training includes three subsets:

1. A detailed explanation of FishBase in all its aspects;
2. A training in the taxonomy of African fishes; and
3. A case study based on data from FishBase or on taxa for which taxonomic problems have been encountered.

The main focus of the training is on fish biodiversity data and their integration into FishBase, and on how to use and contribute data to FishBase. The context of these contributions may vary and can also include the knowledge on common names, fish ecology, fisheries statistics, aquaculture and many other areas of fish biology.

After the training, the participants should be able to make their own contribution to fish biology and continue to work on FishBase. They are encouraged to teach their newly apprehended skills to new/local users, to help in completing the database and keeping it up to date, and to spread the use of FishBase as a source of information and a fisheries tool.

This course has been offered annually since 2005 and is held at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Leuvensesteenweg 13, B-3080 Tervuren, Belgium).

To apply for traineeship and for more information, go to:
http://www.africamuseum.be/research/collaborations/training/group?set_language=en&cl=en

Please note that for 2014, this course will be given in French only.

Contact: Dimitri Geelhand de Merxem (dimitri.geelhand@africamuseum.be)

The Biodiversity Data Journal goes beyond the basics of the Gold Open Access

There are two main modes of open access publishing – Green Open Access, where the author has the right to provide free access to the article outside the publisher's web site in a repository or on his/her own website, and Gold Open Access, where articles are available for free download directly from the publisher on the day of publication.

Opening of content and data, however does not necessarily mean "easy to discover and re-use". The Biodiversity Data Journal proposed the term "Advanced Open Access" to describe an integrated, narrative (text) and data publishing model where the main goal is to make content "re-usable" and "interoperable" for both humans and computers.

To publish effectively in open access, it is not sufficient simply to provide PDF or HTML files online. It is crucial to put these under a reuse-friendly license and to implement technologies that allow machine-readable content and data to be harvested and collated into a big data pool.

The Advanced Open Access means:

• Free to read
• Free to re-use, revise, remix, redistribute
• Easy to discover and harvest
• Content automatically summarised by aggregators
• Data and narrative integrated to the widest extent possible
• Human- and computer-readable formats
• Community-based, pre- and post-publication peer-review
• Community ownership of data
• Free to publish or at low cost affordable by all

BDJ shortens the distance between "narrative" (text) and "data" publishing. Many data types, such as species occurrences, checklists, measurements and others, are converted into text from spreadsheets for better readability by humans. Conversely, text from an article can be downloaded as structured data or harvested by computers for further analysis.

"Open access is definitely one of the greatest steps in scientific communication comparable to the invention of the printing technology or the peer-review system. Great but not sufficient!" said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder of Pensoft Publishers and the Biodiversity Data Journal. "We need to switch the focus already from making content 'available for free download' to being discoverable and extractable. Such re-usability multiplies society's investment in science".

Additional information:

The Biodiversity Data Journal is designed by Pensoft Publishers and was funded in part by the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7) project ViBRANT.

Source: Smith V, Georgiev T, Stoev P, Biserkov J, Miller J, Livermore L, Baker E, Mietchen D, Couvreur T, Mueller G, Dikow T, Helgen K, Frank J, Agosti D, Roberts D, Penev L (2013) Beyond dead trees: integrating the scientific process in the Biodiversity Data Journal. Biodiversity Data Journal 1: e995. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.1.e995

Ecological modellers require reliable sources of data for their analysis. Often, these sources are databases, checklists and specimen labels. Yet another rich source is the corpus of biological literature. It is estimated that there are well over 100 million pages of scientific publications and the volume grows every year. Publishing in advanced XML-based journals, such as Zookeys, Phytokeys or the Biodiversity Data Journal is recommended for new data, but what is the solution for legacy texts?

The EU FP7 project pro-iBiosphere has been piloting the mark-up and extraction of biological information from literature, which has been pioneered by Plazi (Agosti & Egloff, 2009). The EU FP7 Coordination and Support Action "pro-iBiosphere" was launched to investigate ways to increase the accessibility of biodiversity data, improve the efficiency of its curation and increase the user base of biodiversity data consumers and applications. The project addresses the technical and semantic interoperability between different forms in which data are published and analyses the sustainability issues related to the maintenance and curation of biodiversity data and derived information and knowledge. It also involves encouraging the biodiversity community to publish biodiversity data in a way that satisfies the technical requirements for an envisioned Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System.

In order to reach these objectives three pilots for data mark-up and one for interoperability are being conducted (for detailed information on the pilots please see here). The mark-up pilots are evaluating accessibility of data within literature for a wide range of organisms and data types; and ways to facilitate  extraction of biological information from literature, including observations, traits, nomenclature, habitat information and interactions between organisms. For example, one pilot is looking at biogeographic data using the species Chenopodium vulvaria as a subject. In another, trait data is being extracted from literature on tropical mistletoes; while yet others are extracting data from papers on spiders, ants, centipedes, mosses and fungi.

In order to extract these data one can use either "born" digital texts or scanned texts, converted through text capture. These texts are then progressively marked up into XML documents, with tags defining the meaning of the containing text. The degree of mark-up granularity and the choice of textual elements to be marked-up depend on the type of data to be extracted and its granularity in the text. In taxonomically based literature, text is usually divided into the individual "treatments" for each species. Fortunately, most paragraph elements of these texts are in standard formats, for example, separate blocks of text contain the physical description of the organism, details of the distribution and habitat information, often separated with sub-headings.

The pro-iBiosphere pilots have used several methods for mark-up, but the main tool has been the GoldenGate Editor, which combines manual and automated methods to identify key text elements. For example, an algorithm identifies Latin names and then an interface guides the user through the verification of the algorithm’s results. Once marked-up, the XML document can be uploaded to the Plazi document repository. Plazi is a not-for-profit organization devoted to promoting open-access to taxonomic literature. You are free to use the data contained in Plazi’s repository and if you want you can refine the mark-up for your own purposes.

Extracting data from the legacy literature can be expensive. Modern XML based publications have additional advantages of linkages via DOI identifiers, and immediate dissemination to harvesters like EOL or GBIF. Yet, digitisation and mark-up has the possibility to reanimate the data in our publications, making them almost as useful as modern linked publications.

Task 3.4 of EU-BON is to develop tools to prepare, extract and mine published biodiversity literature (led by Plazi - Donat Agosti). For this task Plazi is looking for rich sources of data from the biodiversity literature, particularly where those data can be applied within other EU-BON tasks. For further information please contact Plazi

Agosti, D., & Egloff, W. (2009). Taxonomic information exchange and copyright: the Plazi approach. BMC research notes, 2(1), 53. doi:10.1186/1756-0500-2-53

Quentin Groom (National Botanic Garden, Belgium) & Donat Agosti (Plazi)