A very elegant and sophisticated plotting package for R. Looks a lot easier to use than the basic graphics package once you've mastered the language.

Nice mitochondria!

"And it gets worse: meeting organizers will invariably sandwich your poster between two posters that are infinitely more entertaining, such as "Teaching house cats to perform cold fusion" and "Mating preferences in extraordinarily adorable red pandas." In such a situation, your poster must be interesting and visually slick if you hope to attract viewers."

Science merit badges. Some of the stories that go along with the badges are hilarious, particularly the ones which involve blowing things up accidentally, or causing the building to be evacuated. I'm eligible for a few myself, but you'll have to guess which!

New version of Papers with an iPhone companion application. Can't wait to try it out. Colleagues without Macs are always very jealous when they see me using Papers.

Wow. This is terrific: AppleScript to format in-text citations in Pages, dragged from BibDesk

Surprised that I haven't come across this before: Mac-based science stuff.

Good article on Open Access journals.

"We think what happened is that the cats sort of domesticated themselves," Carlos Driscoll, one of the study authors, told the Washington Post. The cats invited themselves in, and over time, as people favored cats with more docile traits, certain cats adapted to this new environment, producing the dozens of breeds of house cats known today.

An ingenious tiny digital camera attached to a cat, taking shots at intervals and revealing the secret doings of your average moggy.

Brilliant satirical cartoon on the current anti-wifi hysteria. I think that "WiFi Routers: Silent, Blinking DEATH?" would make a fantastic t-shirt.

This looks like fun, and is extremely pretty as well as being science-y: "PLASMA PONG is a variation of PONG that utilizes real-time fluid dynamics to drive the game environment."

"3. Don't worry about scientific accuracy when employing metaphors. If you're writing a book about physics, it doesn't matter if you get your biology right. After all, it's just a metaphor! What better way to demonstrate the theory of relativity than to compare it to how humans evolved from beluga whales?"

Public domain audio book version of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

A fantastic piece by Ben Goldacre on Gillian McKeith's total lack of scientific understanding. [via plasticbag.org]

Some good tips here that I might pass on to my students. I don't agree with removing error bars though, even for a non-scientific audience. For one thing, scientists read those articles too, and we need our error bars, dammit!

Nice! I really like the idea of neurotransmitter earrings.

Research on procrastination shows that lack of confidence in succeeding in a task is at the root of procrastination.

A very cool mixture of technology and organic control: using pigeons equipped with GPS-enabled air pollution monitors to map air quality. Their flights are overlaid on a Google Map, with the readings for carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides provided for each leg of the flight.

Some lovely images of science. The blackboard anatomy illustration is particularly stunning.

You really have to see this video. Vertebrae? Pfft, over-rated in my view.

Music generated by mathematical algorithm. Really much better than it sounds, and the ambient ones make calming but unusual ringtones.

These are wonderful. I love 'Driven' and 'Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny'.

Encouraging news

Talks on Open Science

It will be interesting to see where they go with this. The beta is a heck of a lot faster than Web of Knowledge, though perhaps not as thorough.

Laurie Anderson is NASA's artist in residence. Those NASA dudes have taste.