It's been one of those weeks. As we continue to grow, the list of non-fun things (fun things being reading science articles here) needing doing can be overwhelming but what really makes me crazy is when I miss unintentional humor and someone else catches it and then I wish I had thought of it. Such as ... - Skepchick

Stem cells in menstrual blood?- “While collecting menstrual blood stromal cells (MenSCs) directly from tissue would be invasive, retrieving them during the menstrual cycle would not be.” MenSCs?! You have got to be joking. (Thanks, Steve!)

That's gold and I can respond to any criticisms with, "Hey, blame science, not me."

Get that guy a column here

I don't know who writes Brain Stimulant, it just says "Mike", but he consistently does good blog-type stuff on neuroscience, like this on neurowarfare. We aren't big in the blogosphere, to be sure, and people come here to read feature articles like they do USA Today or Discover or anything else, but I like reading those commentary pieces of a shorter nature too, and I hope we do more of it. I think then it would get more popular here. Speaking of USA Today and Discover, they do have blogs, which probably have the same attention ratio as our articles-to-blogs ratio here, so we should show them the love, and I will: On Discover blogs, baby diet news was big this week. "Classical Baby" DVDs are out (and, really, only the laziest parent ever rationalized it was ever 'in' for any reason other than getting some peace for a few minutes, just like a 'Bugs Bunny' cartoon) and diet is in. Mom's diet and baby's early diet impact all kinds of things, latest studies show. Like most things, your suspension of disbelief is important in this regard. USA Today's Science Fair blog is written by a group - how many, who are they? - but they consistently scour the blogosphere for good stuff and turned me on to this Slate video of why those Russian Soyuz engineers can't do math: I don't know how many there are writing that but I do know Angela "she's funnier when she uses pithy tag lines like this" Gunn needs to go back using pithy tag lines. They're as much fun as the blog. Ideonexus is written by a software developer but he is also an Amateur Science Ninja at night so he rates a mention. He searches for good stuff too, but unlike a lot of people (too many), his stuff is not overrun by press release aggregators who don't actually write anything but have good marketing (physorg,sciencedaily, 10 billion other sites) so you can always find something you didn't see on your own. Ideonexus replaced Ideonexus Beta, which is pretty funny too.

Get that guy a column part 2

Ole Nielsen, writing on Opera blogs (told you everyone has them - even web browsers ) did one of those terrific science writeups on the year 1600 Huaynaputina eruption in Peru that I feel better for having read, mostly because his overview of the event and the impact was better than ours. Look at that, we found 4 science blogs to write about and not a one of them was based on writing tirades about religion or George Bush. 2 years ago people said Science blogging was an intellectual abortion populated solely by fringe weirdos but we started writing real science a year ago (and we do pretty darn well traffic wise without the controversy) and now it's really taking off. 60 million non-political science readers can't be wrong and we get our share but it's nice to see other people chipping in. Taking science blogging back for science will pay dividends for all of us.

P.S. I am tickled about that Opera blogs thing. Opera has always been and remains the greatest browser in the world and they've consistently gone the extra mile doing good things for their users and just throwing in blog capability is an example of that value-added mentality.