The journal Evolution: Education and Outreach has a great piece on the evolution of whales, complete with pictures. As the piece says, "cetacean origin is one of the best known examples of macroevolution documented in the fossil record."

The authors, leading researchers in the field, lay out the details with pictures of fossils, whale embryos, and even a four-limbed dolphin. Evolution: Education and Outreach is aimed in part at K-12 teachers, so this piece is not too technical. You're not going to find a better short intro to whale evolution.

John Tierney wants to know - how widespread is the problem of unethical competition in science? Here's the problem explained by Dr Sean Cutler on Tierney's blog:

Sadly, there is a lot of unethical competition that goes on in science. This year alone, I have heard of cases that are the scientific equivalent of insider trading, where reviewers of important papers exploit their access to privileged data to gain unfair advantages in the “race” to the next big discovery. I have heard of researchers being ignored when they request published materials from scientists.

The evolution game Spore was somewhat of a critical flop - especially among scientists. The game has glitzy graphics, but, for a game billed as being somehow connected to science, the science sucked.  What's more important, many of us thought the game play could have been improved with better science.
Well, if the Spore guys had gotten together with the creator of Swimbots, (or GenePool - not sure which is the real name) the result might have been amazing graphics, gameplay, and science:

As Feynman told the story in late 1959:

We have friends in other fields---in biology, for instance. We physicists often look at them and say, "You know the reason you fellows are making so little progress?" (Actually I don't know any field where they are making more rapid progress than they are in biology today.) ``You should use more mathematics, like we do." They could answer us---but they're polite, so I'll answer for them: "What you should do in order
for us to make more rapid progress is to make the electron microscope 100 times better."

Will we ever have a set of standardized biochemical devices that synthetic biologists can snap together to make more complex systems? I'm skeptical that any single standardized biological device will hold up well under very different cellular contexts, without a lot of trial-and error modifications. We may successfully end up with a few really useful parts, but I'm betting that ultimately the catalog of useful and widely functional parts is going to be limited.