Ricky – thanks for creating my favorite science site, as far as I’m concerned this is THE place for me to get my fix on what’s going on in science news. Good luck with future endeavors.

I’d like to suggest a couple of small, but important changes to the RDF feed.

- allow at least a full paragraph (or two) in the <description> tag. Enough for a hook, but not enough that the site doesn’t get visited.

- include the XML orange rectangle logo behind the RDF link. This will help those people who don’t know what RDF is understand right away that it’s an RSS style feed.

Also, at some point you may want to look into converting from RDF to RSS (name recognition, etc – can’t comment on technical differences). Can someone more knowledgeable expand on this?

Thanks and good luck.

One project I’ve wanted to do for a long time (in fact I was working on this when Drog first contacted me to do SciScoop and since put it aside with only sporadic effort since) is write some computer code to analyze data from the Hipparcos mission and search for traces of exoplanet transits.  I’ve downloaded 118,000 (!!!) webpages of data from the European Space Agency  (yeah, ESA, that was no denial of service attack, that was me) so now I have a complete set of around 14 million photometric observations  on a CD-ROM to wade through.  Whatever I find I’m gonna write up for The Astronomical Journal as my first published scientific paper and then email Jaymie Matthews on the Canadian MOST project and request some telescope time for a few weeks to see if my most promising candidates turn out to be real planets.  If they do, and I get the MOST team excited about trying to discover a new planet per week for a while, it could take years to go down my list and verify them all.  

After I double the number of known extrasolar planets known to mankind and get the “explore strange new worlds” block checked off, it’s gonna be on to the “seek out new life” part of the Star Trek mantra.  Back in 1998 I was working as a private engineering consultant and had a period of about 6 months between paid jobs and during that time I was fortunate enough to meet Maria Ragland (now Davis), a local scientist at the now-defunct Research Genetics that at one time employed 600 DNA techs here in Huntsville before it was bought out and moved.  I told her about an idea I had to genetically engineer blue roses using an approach that avoided the acidic-tissue-deactivating-the-normal-blue-pigment-pathway problem that has bedeviled Florigene’s efforts.  She thought it was a great idea and actually got me on as a guest researcher at RG for six months at no pay, allowing me to learn how to run gels and splice DNA and all that interesting stuff.  I had some very interesting preliminary results in Arabidopsis test plants ((my test DNA definitely “took” in the leaves instead of the flower petals) but reality intervened and I had to go get a real paying job about the time they shut Research Genetics down.  Anyway, I ran into Maria for the first time in years at one of the recent local Partnership for Biotechnology Research meetings; she’s teaching biology at UAH now and bless her heart, she told me she still has my frozen sample box with all of my DNA plasmids I worked up because she knew that someday I’d be coming back to keep working on that.  So hang on, Maria, you’ve got me fired up and I’m a comin one of these days…

Thene there’s Max, the supercomputer cluster of 486-class motherboards I’ve been tinkering with for years out in my garage.  I’ve only told gypsy what evil daytrading plans I have for THAT, and it’s about time I wrote the software to do it…so watch out, Wall Street.

Getting these three projects finished and off my conscience, I intend to move on to something that’s REALLY interesting and important.  It will take some daydreaming to figure out just what.  But my wife (who’s older than me) just got her AARP card (double gasp) and if that ain’t motivation to start paying attention to the clock and start wrapping up the long term projects you care about, I don’t know what is….

After that if you ever say to yourself “I wish there was a story / more stories on SciScoop…”, well, you know what to do:

1. Go to Eurekalert and get an interesting public domain press release, preferably following the Eurekalert link in the story back to the original press release from some particular institution.
2. Copy the press release into the SciScoop submit story form, with four or five paragraphs max in the top part and the rest in the bottom part; reshuffle the words if necessary to get interesting paragraphs and quotes up front.
3. At the bottom of the story add “From an XYZ press release” and add a link; always credit the words of others.
4. Add a few links of your own to interesting people, nouns and phrases in the press release using Google and Wikipedia.
5. Optionally, add a sentence or two up front in your own words that’s some kind of lead in to the main story – humorous, thoughtful, off the wall, free association – preferably with links of your own.
6. Always put in the wackiest title you can think of that’s still true to the story, to draw readers in who see just that headline via the SciScoop RSS news feed.

This is a great site.  David will make it better.  But it will never be its very best unless you add your contribution, too.