Height Reference System Modernization Natural Resources Canada has decided to improve their height reference system. This is the basis for both mapping and many other societal areas including climate…

Every scientist wants to be an iconoclast, but most end up doing rather conventional work. Understandably, because it takes a special sort of nerve to risk your career and reputation on an idea or…

The Arena.Net folks have produced one of the first FAQs with regard to Guild Wars 2. It answers a lot of basic questions about the game, including whether or not there will be a subscription fee.…

As the name implies, the Friday Grab Bag is a collection of community questions taken from the official Dark Age of Camelot forums. Add some announcements into the mix and you have a good read. Q. Is…

Yes, it's possible, according to John Hawks (who writes an excellent blog): So, I can say without any doubt (if other examples had not been sufficient), it is absolutely possible to write a daily,…

OK, I'm about to dive into an issue I probably shouldn't be talking about on a blog, at least if I have any hope of convincing a hiring committee to consider me, but I'm going to dumbly rush ahead.…

Larry Moran directs us to have a look at Species-Scape at the Cornell website. It's great. But... 1. It has one group of "prokaryotes", Kingdom Monera, which is pretty old school. (Same goes for "…

DEAR GENERAL CHEMISTRY TEACHERS by CAMILO APITA TABINAS: GOOD DAY! I am pleased to introduce to you "Naming and Writing Simple Inorganic Chemical Formulas Text and Module with Worksheets", a book…

I already posted one of these figures in an earlier version of What's wrong with these figures?, but the other one of them I hadn't noticed. For the answers, please see the post on Evolgen.

I just got my hands on a recent book by two influential biologists, Marc Kirschner, chair of Harvard's recently created Systems Biology Department, and John Gerhart, a professor at UC Berkeley. Their…

Dividing is one of the trickiest things a cell has to do. The cell needs to faithfully copy its entire genome, with very few mistakes, and it needs to then divvy up those two genome copies equally…

"Can scientists and journalists learn to beat the doubt industry before our most serious problems beat us all?" This is the question asked in an interesting piece at a news? site I've never heard of…

The move from Blogger to Scientific Blogging has been good overall, and I am certainly enjoying more hits and a broader readership from outside the normal blogosphere. However, I have also noticed…

Yes, not much of a post, but after many hours of trials and errors it appeared that Novell insisted corrupting the grub boot loader in an Ubuntu installaation, I had to switch to Lilo, not entirely…

We like to talk about the amazingly complex machinery of the cell: flagella that resemble finely tuned outboard motors, or complex information processing circuits that help a cell process information…

Scientific Blogging is a work in progress and lots of neat features (some of which are visible, some are not) are being incorporated continually.  As things move forward, it is helpful to bug…

As many of you are aware, a new journal entitled Evolution: Education and Outreach was launched in late 2007, with three issues now available.  What you may not know is that the journal also…

Or something.  See the paper about blogs by John Wilkins, in press in TREE. [HT: Laelaps, who in my professional opinion has every right to blog about science and does a dandy job too…

Carl Zimmer has posted a spiffy summary of the word usage in his book Microcosm using the super cool Wordle site. For fun, I put in the text of two recent papers (one in press, one in review).…

A report in this week's issue of Science describes a set of genes that enable members of the bacterial species Proteus mirabilis to tell the difference between kin and strangers. The bacteria engage…