This week we are launching a brand new look for Authorea and a couple of exciting new features aimed at making scientific research more interactive. Since the very beginning of Authorea, we have been striving to make collaborative scientific writing as easy as possible. But in addition to WRITING, we are also creating a space for new ways of READING science, and EXECUTING it. For example, if you are a scientist, chances are that you do a lot of data analysis and you might want to visualize and provide access to your data in some FUN, NEW, INTERACTIVE, MORE MEANINGFUL, DATA-DRIVEN ways, rather than the usual static, data-less plot. There are many ways to create this kind of interactive plots. In this short blog post we will look at two of them.

(200 Words Max) Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis vestibulum diam a eleifend tincidunt. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Morbi libero risus, pretium ac urna vel, iaculis sagittis nisl. Duis non sapien justo. Quisque elementum, mauris a ullamcorper pharetra, mauris enim ullamcorper urna, sit amet fermentum sem nulla vel nibh. Etiam id urna non leo condimentum egestas pulvinar sit amet ex. Aenean faucibus eget dui at gravida. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum sodales neque dolor, et mollis turpis viverra non.

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Lab 6 instructed us to design a digital to analog converter in order to generate a square wave which would drive a speaker connected to the supplied FPGA. We also needed to be able to set the amplitude of the generated signal using the DIP switches present. This lab was very useful to show the basic theory behind digital to analog converters which need to turn digital values into actual signals. Also, this square wave generator is very useful in creating complicated audio signals which are composed of square waves of varying frequency.

Are you comparing Microsoft Word vs Authorea?Choosing the right word processor for your documents is very important. Microsoft Word and Authorea have one main fundamental difference: Word functions offline and Authorea functions online. That means that if you're working in collaboration with other people, you never have to check that you're editing the last version. Authorea always has the last version!In addition to being an online tool, Authorea has some features that make it perfect for you if you are writing a scholarly manuscript, a student essay, a math heavy manuscript, a technical blog post, or a data-driven document. We list here a few key comparison points that show how MS Word and Authorea are different.

INTRODUCTION - Knowledge transfer is one of the key aspects of understanding the world, as we pass on learnings from one generation to the other. - International development is one of the critical sectors that needs major improvement in the way that we create, share, and apply knowledge. - This is because international development, encapsulates our efforts to improve the basic living conditions and opportunities of marginalized and underserved people around the world.

Interactive figures in Authorea documentsAuthorea enables embedding of interactive, dynamic, data-driven figures directly into articles. These can be diagrams from external services like CartoDB or diagrams from a javascript library like d3.js, flotchart, or bokeh.To insert an interactive figure, click Insert Interactive Figure  from the toolbar and select the HTML file that you wish to add to your document. 

Peer review is arguably necessary for effective communication amongst researchers.  Authors, editors, and the public rely on peer review to ensure a first measure of trust in scientific communication.  While peer review is considered to be integral in scholarly communication by most, its shortcomings are becoming evident. Former editor of JAMA and NEJM Drummond Rennie once said, "if peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market." Is this true? Does peer review, as it is done today, cause more harm than good?

What does being a scientist mean to you?To me, science is about thinking rationally, solving problems and enjoying learning new things about the universe. People who are not professional scientists can also be scientists. This is the idea behind "citizen science" projects: https://www.zooniverse.org. You, too, can be a scientist, even if it’s only for an hour at a time!  Can you summarize the main focus of your research and what drew you to that field of study/work?I use numerical simulations to model how stars like our sun formed. When I was a physics graduate student I was interested in working on some kind of computational modeling. It turns out there are a lot of really interesting complex problems in astrophysics that you can only study with large computers. The study of star formation has a lot of different physics in it: gravity, magnetic fields, turbulence, and radiation. These interact in nonlinear and sometimes unexpected ways, which make star formation a fun thing to model. I also use the simulations to make cool movie

A textual abstract of about 50 words.

Are you comparing Paperpile to other reference managers?Choosing the right reference manager for your scholarly documents is very important. Paperpile is a modern reference and PDF management system. Authorea is a word processor with an integrated reference management system. Paperpile is a fantastic tool that's useful in combination with Google Docs and Microsoft Word, while Authorea is itself a word processor that competes with Google Docs and Word.Authorea's reference management system is seamlessly integrate inside the word processor so that you don't even have to worry about managing references anymore. In this article, we list a few key comparison points that show how Paperpile and Authorea are different.

[] _Social_ is probably the last word that people who know me well (Hi Mom!) would use to describe me. But being one of those pesky _millenials_, I was born too late to ever get to know the (academic) Dark Ages intimately, i.e. the pre-internet past. That, and my abysmal high school diploma, which made sure that no university would accept me for studies in the two years after finishing school – afforded me lots of spare time for _professional social networking/instagramming_, or _blogging_ as it was called then. So I came, somewhat naturally, from blogging about my daily routines to writing about my adventures in the lab, studying and doing science. At some point in ~2008 this developed into the idea of doing a joint science blog with Philipp, then my fellow student of biology, now my co-conspirator on _openSNP_. Being good students we came up with the blog’s title, _Beerology_, after a couple of those I assume (nope, the pun doesn’t really work better in German). Writing about our studies, the latest scientific papers we had read and about the political changes in European Academia not only helped in learning about other perspectives through comments, but also in more tangible scientific experiences. Besides regularly meeting up with other blogging scientists, it also helped in getting around a bit, like like my trip to the _Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings_ in 2010. Many of the friendships formed on these trips are good and lasting. In the best case allowing me to Erdős-esk crash on couches around the globe, re-visiting friends wherever the academic life brings me to. This already means the world if you’ve been on the research-travel-circuit for long enough. However, it probably won't convince everyone of the benefits of social media. Especially not if you're dealing with people who for example complain about things like _professional instagramming_. So let’s instead turn to the metrics that scientists care about: getting publications out. According to Google Scholar I’ve (co-)published 12 manuscripts since 2012. Why is this relevant in the context of discussing the benefits of Social Media for your research? Well, just looking through these I find that OVER 40% OF MY PUBLICATIONS WERE ONLY EVER WRITTEN IN THAT FORM THANKS TO SOCIAL MEDIA. My Master’s degree in Ecology & Evolution nicely explains my work on plants/fungi/fish/rabbit poop (yes, that’s a thing). But my work on bioethics and personal genomics is not a natural fit to my professional education, to say the least. And this is because those were developed completely independently, to a good extent even while I was still finishing up said degree. First, there are the two publications on family-wide personal genomics and crowdsourced personal genomics. These go back to Philipp and me finding the work by @manuelcorpas on these topics more or less accidentally on Twitter & Reddit. Some tweets & emails back-and-forth later I was not only sitting on a plane to the UK to meet in person & discuss how to improve our project _openSNP_, but it also led to two very cool papers, with one of them even being the second-most influential paper in that journal for that year. In a similar way the collaborations with @EffyVayena go back to Twitter as far as I can tell. Besides working on participant-led research, we also did a large survey amongst the users of _openSNP_, collecting very useful data on our cohort, which is being analyzed and written up right now. It’s hard to overstate how useful these connections have been and still are, especially given that I was still early in my career at the time of embarking on those collaborations. Usually you don’t easily get the opportunity to form international collaborations as a Master’s student. But thanks to social media you might as well, especially if you want to connect with people outside your own narrow research field. Because if it was not for social media, I probably would not have been doing some social science. So the TL;DR is: SOCIAL MEDIA ISN’T ONLY GREAT TO FIND PEOPLE TO TALK SCIENCE TO, BUT ALSO TO FIND PEOPLE WITH WHOM YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO SCIENCE.

(250 Word Max) Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis vestibulum diam a eleifend tincidunt. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Morbi libero risus, pretium ac urna vel, iaculis sagittis nisl. Duis non sapien justo. Quisque elementum, mauris a ullamcorper pharetra, mauris enim ullamcorper urna, sit amet fermentum sem nulla vel nibh. Etiam id urna non leo condimentum egestas pulvinar sit amet ex. Aenean faucibus eget dui at gravida. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum sodales neque dolor, et mollis turpis viverra non.

Thomas Edison has an impressive 2,332 worldwide patents. Some of his well-known inventions include the phonograph, motion pictures, and the magnetic iron ore separator. After the success of his first major invention, the quadruplex telegraph, Edison wanted to build his own laboratory so that he could continue to innovate. In 1875, he purchased around 34 acres in Raritan Township, NJ and built the "Invention Factory". By Spring 1876, the Invention Factory consisted of a main laboratory, ancillary buildings, a carpenters’ shop, carbon shed, and blacksmith shop. His first breakthrough at the Invention Factory, the phonograph, produced the first voice recording (“Mary Had a Little Lamb”) and earned Edison the title, “The Wizard of Menlo Park”.

Hello, welcome to Authorea! My name is Alberto and I wrote this short document to get you acquainted with Authorea. I am an Astronomerand Computer Scientist by training (I was a Postdoc at the Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics until 1 year ago) and with the help of some colleagues, I created Authorea - a collaborative writing platform for science. I received today a request for using Authorea for documents porduced by the THIRTY METER TELESCOPE TIME-DOMAIN SCIENCE DEFINITION TEAM. You should have received an email notification to open this article. How does it work? Double click anywhere on the text to start writing. In addition to simple text you can also add text formatted in BOLDFACE, _italic_, and yes, math in LaTeX too: E = mc²! Add images by drag’n’drop or click on the “Insert Figure” button.

THEORY OF EVOLUTION AND DEATH OF MASSIVE STARS Overview of the material that will be covered at the “Look & Listen” School 2014 Abstract We will first cover some basic principles of stellar evolution, with a particular emphasis on the physics of massive stars. Then we will focus on the phenomena that are currently believed to prominently influence the life of massive stars and determine the conditions at the pre-SN stage. Informed by the most recent observational results, we will also focus on some unsolved problems in stellar physics and how they could impact the death of massive stars and their stellar remnants. Schedule 1. Tuesday 14 Jan - Principles of stellar evolution (20+10) - Massive Stars evolution: Main Sequence and He-Burning (20+10) - Massive Stars evolution: Late evolutionary stages (20+10) 2. Thursday 16 Jan - Stellar Rotation (20+10) - Stellar Rotation and Magnetic Fields (20+10) - Mass loss (20+10) 3. Friday 17 Jan - Massive Binary Stars (20+10) - Very Massive Stars (20+10) - Progenitors of NS/BH, SNe, PISNe, GRBs (20+10)

The search for extrasolar planets (EXOPLANETS) is one of the most rapidly expanding fields in astrophysics. Thanks to recent space-based efforts the number of detected planets in extrasolar stellar systems has increased dramatically, and more than 900 objects have been identified as of today, see e.g. http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/. With candidates identified in the so-called habitable zone (HZ)[1] the question of extraterrestrial life becomes very actual. Here we discuss ideas that could lead to infer the presence (or the past existence) of an extraterrestrial civilization by the detection of artifacts in orbit around the host planet. [1] The theoretical band around a star where a planet could orbit and host liquid water

Preparation of ArticlesPlease note that original articles must contain the following components. Please see below for further details. Cover letter Title page (excluding acknowledgements) Abstract Introduction Materials (or Subjects) and Methods Results Discussion Acknowledgements Conflict of Interest References Figure legends Tables Figures Reports of clinical trials must adhere to the registration and reporting requirements listed in the Editorial Policies. Cover Letter: The uploaded covering letter must state the material is original research, has not been previously published and has not been submitted for publication elsewhere while under consideration. If the manuscript has been previously considered for publication in another journal, please include the previous reviewer comments, to help expedite the decision by the Editorial team. Please include a Conflict of Interest statement. Title Page: The title page should bear the title of the paper, the full names of all the authors and their affiliations, together with the name, full postal address, telephone and fax numbers and e-mail address of the author to whom correspondence and offprint requests are to be sent (this information is also asked for on the electronic submission form). The title page must also contain a Conflict of Interest statement (see Editorial Policy section). The title should be brief, informative, of 150 characters or less and should not make a statement or conclusion. The running title should consist of no more than 50 letters and spaces. It should be as brief as possible, convey the essential message of the paper and contain no abbreviations. Authors should disclose the sources of any support for the work, received in the form of grants and/or equipment and drugs. If authors regard it as essential to indicate that two or more co-authors are equal in status, they may be identified by an asterisk symbol with the caption ‘These authors contributed equally to this work’ immediately under the address list. Subject Categories: The Subject Categories are used to structure the current and archived online content of The ISME Journal, and to help readers interested in particular areas of microbial ecology find relevant information more easily. Subject Categories are also indicated in the table of contents and on the title page of the published article. Authors should suggest an appropriate Subject Category for the submitted manuscript. One category may be selected from the following list: Microbial population and community ecology Microbe-microbe and microbe-host interactions Evolutionary genetics Integrated genomics and post-genomics approaches in microbial ecology Microbial engineering Geomicrobiology and microbial contributions to geochemical cycles Microbial ecology and functional diversity of natural habitats Microbial ecosystem impacts Abstract: Original Articles must be prepared with an unstructured abstract designed to summarise the essential features of the paper in a logical and concise sequence. Materials/Subjects and Methods: This section should contain sufficient detail, so that all experimental procedures can be reproduced, and include references. Methods, however, that have been published in detail elsewhere should not be described in detail. Authors should provide the name of the manufacturer and their location for any specifically named medical equipment and instruments, and all drugs should be identified by their pharmaceutical names, and by their trade name if relevant. Results and Discussion: The Results section should briefly present the experimental data in text, tables or figures. Tables and figures should not be described extensively in the text, either. The discussion should focus on the interpretation and the significance of the findings with concise objective comments that describe their relation to other work in the area. It should not repeat information in the results. The final paragraph should highlight the main conclusion(s), and provide some indication of the direction future research should take. Acknowledgements: These should be brief, and should include sources of support including sponsorship (e.g. university, charity, commercial organisation) and sources of material (e.g. novel drugs) not available commercially.Conflict of Interest: Authors must declare whether or not there are any competing financial interests in relation to the work described. This information must be included at this stage and will be published as part of the paper. Conflict of interest should be noted in the cover letter and also on the title page. Please see the Conflict of Interest documentation in the Editorial Policy section for detailed information. References: Only papers directly related to the article should be cited. Exhaustive lists should be avoided. References should follow the Havard format. In the text of the manuscript, a reference should be cited by author and year of publication eg (Bailey & Kowalchuk, 2006) and (Heidelberg et al, 1994) and listed at the end of the paper in alphabetical order of first author. References should be listed and journal titles abbreviated according to the style used by Index Medicus, examples are given below. All authors should be listed for papers with up to six authors; for papers with more than six authors, the first six only should be listed, followed by et al. Abbreviations for titles of medical periodicals should conform to those used in the latest edition of Index Medicus. The first and last page numbers for each reference should be provided. Abstracts and letters must be identified as such. Papers in press may be included in the list of references. Personal communications must be allocated a number and included in the list of references in the usual way or simply referred to in the text; the authors may choose which method to use. In either case authors must obtain permission from the individual concerned to quote his/her unpublished work. Examples: Journal article: Cho JC, Kim MW, Lee DH, Kim SJ. (1997). Response of bacterial communities to changes in composition of extracellular organic carbon from phytoplankton in Daechung reservoir (Korea). Arch Hydrobiol 138:559–576. Journal article, e-pub ahead of print: Eng-Kiat L, Bowles DJ. A class of plant glycosyltransferases involved in cellular homeostasis. EMBO J 2004; e-pub ahead of print 8 July 2004, doi: 10.1038/sj.emboj.7600295. Journal article, in press: Lim E-K, Ashford DA, Hou B, Jackson RG, Bowles DJ. (2004). Arabidopsis glycosyltransferases as biocatalysts in fermentation for regioselective synthesis of diverse quercetin glucosides. Biotech Bioeng (in press). Complete book: Sambrook J, Fritsch E, Maniatis T. (1989). Molecular Cloning: a Laboratory Manual. Cold Spring Harbor Press: New York. Chapter in book: Zinder, SH. (1998). Methanogens. In: Burlage, RS (ed). Techniques in Microbial Ecology. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp 113– 136. Tables: Tables should only be used to present essential data; they should not duplicate what is written in the text. It is imperative that any tables used are editable, ideally presented in Excel. Each must be uploaded as a separate workbook with a title or caption and be clearly labelled, sequentially. Please make sure each table is cited within the text and in the correct order, e.g. (Table 3). Please save the files with extensions .xls / .xlsx / .ods / or .doc or .docx. Please ensure that you provide a 'flat' file, with single values in each cell with no macros or links to other workbooks or worksheets and no calculations or functions. Figures: Figures and images should be labelled sequentially and cited in the text. Figures should not be embedded within the text but rather uploaded as separate files. Detailed guidelines for submitting artwork can be found by downloading our Artwork Guidelines. The use of three-dimensional histograms is strongly discouraged when the addition of the third dimension gives no extra information. Artwork Guidelines: Detailed guidelines for submitting artwork can be found by downloading the guidelines PDF. Using the guidelines, please submit production quality artwork with your initial online submission. If you have followed the guidelines, we will not require the artwork to be resubmitted following the peerreview process, if your paper is accepted for publication. Colour on the web: Authors who wish their articles to have FREE colour figures on the web (only available in the HTML (full text) version of manuscripts) must supply separate files in the following format. These files should be submitted as supplementary information and authors are asked to mention they would like colour figures on the web in their submission letter.Reuse of Display Items: See the Editorial Policy section for information on using previously published tables or figures. Standard abbreviations: Because the majority of readers will have experience in microbial ecology, the journal will accept papers which use certain standard abbreviations, without definition in the summary or in the text. Non-standard abbreviations should be defined in full at their first usage in the Summary and again at the first usage in the text, in the conventional manner. If a term is used 1-4 times in the text, it should be defined in full throughout the text and not abbreviated. Supplementary Information: Supplementary information (SI) is peer-reviewed material directly relevant to the conclusion of an article that cannot be included in the printed version owing to space or format constraints. The article must be complete and selfexplanatory without the SI, which is posted on the journal's website and linked to the article. SI may consist of data files, graphics, movies or extensive tables. Please see our Artwork Guidelines for information on accepted file types. Authors should submit supplementary information files in the FINAL format as they are not edited, typeset or changed, and will appear online exactly as submitted. When submitting SI, authors are required to: Include a text summary (no more than 50 words) to describe the contents of each file. Identify the types of files (file formats) submitted. Include the text “Supplementary information is available at (journal name)’s website” at the end of the article and before the references.