Funding Opportunities: Good News for Young Scientists

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As a follow up to last month’s post about opportunities for early career researchers, there is more good news to share!

Since 2007, the Blavatnik Family Foundation has partnered with the New York Academy of Sciences to give the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists to tri-state area postdoctoral and faculty scientists under the age of 42. Last week, it was announced that the billionaire behind the award, Len Blavatnik, is pledging a $30 million, multi-year investment to expand the award nationally, starting in 2014. The award, which was created to help foster innovation and encourage young scientists, has gone to 38 winners in the last 5 years, and applicants were compared from across 62 scientific and technological disciplines. According to the award page, “the expanded National program will be comprised of three overarching disciplinary categories: Physical Sciences and Engineering; Chemistry; and Life Sciences. Every year, one winner in each category will be awarded $250,000 in unrestricted funds.” The postdoctoral program will keep its regional focus and will award $30,000 and $10,000 to winners and finalists, respectively.

Do You Know? Book Domino World Record

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On Friday, May 31, 2013, The Seattle Public Library set a new world record for the longest book domino chain. Can you guess how many books were used? Or how many people it took to set it up? Watch the video to find out!

The event coincided with the launch of the library’s summer reading program. The books in the chain are now being sold by The Friends of The Seattle Public Library to help raise funds for library programs and services.

Scopus Database Adds an Altmetric Component

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Altmetrics (alternative metrics) is a recent development whereby social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, reference managers such Mendeley and Zotero, and blogs and news outlets, are watched in order to track and share evidence of the online impact of a paper.  Scopus has now added an Altmetric feature to the database, located as a sidebar (scroll down), for those references for which this data has been collected. Here is an example of such a reference. To read details of this new Scopus initiative, look at Altmetric for Scopus.