The famous evolutionary tree, drawn by Darwin in one of his notebooks in 1837

It’s Friday and that means that it’s time for our Friday link dump, where we highlight some recent papers (and other stuff) that we found interesting but didn’t have the time to write an entire post about. If you think there’s something we missed, or have something to say, please share in the comments section!

This week we celebrated the155th anniversary of Darwin’s masterpiece the “Origin of species” (published on November 24, 1859).  The “Origin” is undoubtedly one of the most important books of all times, it revolutionized science, philosophy and our understanding of the World. To celebrate this special date, the Cambridge Digital Library released online more than 16,000 pages of the original manuscripts written by Darwin, in high resolution (see it  here). By the end of the project, more than 30,000 pages will be available online for free. You can also download this material at the Darwin Manuscripts Project and at the Darwin Correspondence Project.

Do you want a Nobel Prize? Here is an easy way to get one!  James D. Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, is selling his Nobel Medal. Watson plans to donate  part of the money to his “philanthropic legacy of supporting scientific research, academic institutions and other charitable causes.” See it here.

The latest issue of Nature has a couple of interesting pieces on the peer review system, here and here. One of the papers shows scams where some authors were caught reviewing their own work. – Vinicius Bastazini

Rub Dunn lists 45 things that he’s learned about science since he was a student. My favorites:

33-There are tens of thousands of great ideas in books and papers that no one has ever followed up on. If you are lucky, you will have six of you own great ideas. The odds favor reading old books and papers to improve your chances of working on something novel. If you no longer have old books and old papers in your library, try to read just outside your area of research. Maybe it’ll help you if you do know something about the C cycle after all.

 

45-The more interesting your ideas, the harder it will become to find anyone to tell whether they are brilliant or mad.

The Marine Science institute at UC Santa Barbara is recruiting a post-doc to focus on biodiversity estimation across multiple data sources

A very cool new paper by Michael G. Just et al in Ecosphere shows that humans act as important biogeographical filters for global disease distributions. -Fletcher Halliday

November 28, 2014