Perhaps you struggle with crafting elegant and effective prose. Fear not, gentle reader! Some simple guidelines are available to assist you.   HOW TO WRITE GOOD 1. Avoid alliteration. Always…

Over on Sandwalk, Larry Moran reports on a survey revealing that about 1/4 of Canadians do not believe in God, and that among those under 25 this figure is about 1/3. What he didn't mention was the…

Some science sites are boring, some sites are difficult to navigate. Some don't write much about science at all. We cross all political boundaries and most cultural ones. We have Republicans,…

Can one ever hear too many stories about Richard Feynman? Cosmic Variance brought my attention to a great piece from Physics Today by Daniel Hillis (who worked with Feynman in the 80's to build a…

From Slashdot, a physics professor gets upset that undergrad physics majors at his school aren't required to learn any programming. (Check out the comments for an interesting discussion.) To make…

Larry over at Sandwalk recently addressed complaints that Richard Dawkins' new anthology of great science writing only includes writing by scientists. Larry has some good comments, and suggests it's…

Hello, Noodling Nufers! There's an interesting news item today about rocks on the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that feed on those rocks, and how that might adjust our thinking about the evolution of…

A lathe may be a critical machine shop tool for a manufacturing plants, but what tools go into an industrial biological machine shop? Biological tools are in common use in many manufacturing…

What do you get when you cross the founder of Wikipedia with Cambridge biologist Michael Ashburner and about a million other people? An article in Genome Biology, that's what. It's WikiProteins, the…

Just below the water's surface lies a magical world teeming with life and value. Coral reefs are home to 4,000 fish species and provide the world with goods and services — such as jobs, foods,…

How do you distinguish a male fly from a female fly? Apparently even flies have problems with this one sometimes, and an interesting paper in PNAS describes a recently evolved gene in fruit flies…

I am sure that most readers are familiar with programs like the Nobel Prize winning Doctors Without Borders (i.e., Médecins Sans Frontières) and its spin-offs. Now the New York Academy of Sciences…

Phoenix Mars Lander as well as knowledge about Mars itself depend on geodesy, in particular planetary geodesy. I will put together a piece on that shortly...

No, I don't mean the bagel shops. Why do towering scientific geniuses seem to be a thing of the past? There are many potential reasons, but one fascinating aspect of the question is addressed by the…

Gene Genie #32 is up at Highlight Health, showcasing some great blogging on human genes, genetics, and genetic diseases. Go on over and browse some great Sunday Science reading.

If education can help attitudes about evolution, we have a lot of educating to do. Maybe it was my Scientific Blogging T-shirt, or my anti-Bush bumper sticker, but something motivated a member of the…

Another entry in the "I didn't know about this blog, but I am glad I do now" files: Evolutionary Novelties by Todd Oakley from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Go, read it. Before we…

Not teaching evolution isn't the only problem in America's science classrooms. The evidence for this for this came home today in the form of my third grader's homework. My daughter's third grade…

Hello, all Nufer's noodlers! I hear you're studying evolution, and that's perfect timing - there's a news story today about the evolution of modern amphibians (frogs and salamanders). And…

There's victimization and then there's, apparently, indirect victimization. Even the most popular girl in school can be a victim of indirect victimization, according to University of Alberta…