Back in August, I gave a talk at the Pacific AAAS meeting explaining why research scientists need to blog. After a long delay to put my incomprehensible notes in to readable (but still somewhat fragmented) form, here is my argument for why scientists need to blog:

Expert Blogging in the Science Communication Ecosystem

My talk is about scientists writing science directly for the public. Specifically, I want to get at the question, "What can blogging by scientists bring to the science communication ecosystem of newspapers, TV, and magazines?"

Via Chris Mooney, I learn that Rush Limbaugh, whose ability to smell out a conspiracy is on par with the ability of the male silk moth to sniff out the presence of a female from miles away, has called the whole H1N1 thing a hoax:

What's the relationship between soy consumption and breast cancer? Some major news from JAMA:

Molecular biologists and mathematical models frequently don't mix well, especially when the molecular biologists in question were trained before the rise of genomics, back when most labs only needed a computer for designing new vector sequences, writing papers, and checking email. Behind this skepticism is the intuition that biology is extremely messy (true), and difficult to quantify (also true). Also contributing is the long history of the cell as a molecular black box; for a long time, we had no idea what was going on inside the cell in molecular terms (somewhat analogous to doing chemistry without knowing about atoms), and in fact we still don't know the molecular role of a good chunk of the protein-coding genes in the human genome.