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Tuesday, October 03, 2006
What geeks do with their birthday money
When most people receive money for their birthday they spend it one something like CDs, DVDs, or a cool computer game. Not I. I am now a proud card-carrying student member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publisher of the cutting-edge journal Science. For the next 51 weeks I'll get the latest news from the all over the science world including a handful of academic articles that might as well be in Sanskrit (संस्कृतम्). Like the hair-raising Structure of the Exon Junction Core Complex with a Trapped DEAD-Box ATPase Bound to RNA or the much more light-hearted and whimsical Dok-7 Mutations Underlie a Neuromuscular Junction Synaptopathy (to mention only two articles from the latest issue). I'm going to assume these articles discuss something important for my health and that my membership dues are thus going to important research, but Science does have great news coverage and the occasional report on human evolution or development.
Not content with relying only on Science for my intake of over-my-head hard research, I also subscribed to Nature, the other "the scientific journal." They generally have all the good human origins stuff and other anthropology-related material (again, among all the reports with 20 words in their name). Great news coverage from Nature as well and online access to the entire archives since 1869 is a nice bonus.
Worried that Nature and Science will overload me, I also threw in a subscription to Scientific American, a far more mainstream with more pretty pictures and archaeology-related articles. Not as dense as the other two, it's probably the third most authoritative general science publication in the country. They periodically release excellent posters and graphics with their magazines, much like National Geographic. Hey, National Geographic...oh nevermind.
Posted by Will at October 3, 2006 09:22 PM in General Science | Personal Reflections