Tag: Dinosaurs

Today, we’re happy to announce the integration of the Journal of Paleontological Techniques (JPT) onto our platform! This journal is all about sharing and opening up the methods that palaeontologists use in their day-to-day research.

So if you love Jurassic Park and dinosaurs, this collection is perfect for you! All articles are Open Access, which means they are free to read, share, and re-use by anyone.

Here are some of our absolute favourite new articles:

• Dinosaur frauds, hoaxes, and “Frankensteins” – Dinosaurs and other fossils have been artificially enhanced, or totally forged, to increase their commercial value. Here, several techniques are suggested for detecting hoaxes.
• How to prepare a stegosaur, Portuguese style – Take one monolith jacket, one electric grinder, and a lot of elbow grease, and voila! That’s how you get a dinosaur prepped for science.
• You’re only supposed to blow the bloody rocks off – When splitting stones fails, bring out the drills, crane trucks, and demolition experts. All in the name of science, of course.
• Firing lasers at amber – Particles included in amber fluoresce when you fire a laser at them, and are highly diagnostic of their provenance. Useful!
• Because everyone wants/needs their own sieving laboratory – Sieving is a great and cheap way of getting lots of fossils from sediment. Now you too can sieve for dinosaurs!
• Digitising dinosaurs – Preserving dinosaur fossils is important given their fragility, and using a range of digital techniques this is becoming more and more possible.
• Using a Kinect to 3D scan your own dinosaur – If you’re fortunate enough to own a piece of this gear, pop to your local museum and digitise yourself a dinosaur! (More on photogrammetry in this article)
• Want to print your own dinosaur? – This article will teach you how to prepare freely available 3D scans in order to print them out!

Continue reading “Digging dinosaurs at ScienceOpen”  

Search engines form the core of discovery of research these days. There’s just too much information out there to search journal by journal or on a manual basis.

We highlighted in a previous post the advantages of using ScienceOpen’s dual-layered search and filter functions over others like Google Scholar. Today, we’re happy to announce that we just made it even better!

Say you want to search all of PeerJ’s content. Pop ‘PeerJ’ into the journal search, and it’ll come up with all their content, as it’s all indexed in PubMed. Hey presto, there you have 1530 papers, all with full texts attached. Neat eh! And that will update as more gets published with PeerJ, so you know what to do.

But that’s a lot of content. What you’ve just discovered is the PeerJ megajournal haystack. We want to filter out the needles.

Continue reading “Pimp my search engine”