Love him or hate him, if PZ Myers (Pharyngula) at Seed Media's Scienceblogs.com property were not doing what he does, one of us would have to - so we are inclined to love him. The Catholic League disagrees and they have urged their readership to contact University of Morris president Robert Bruininks to protest PZ's article, It's a Goddamned Cracker, in which he stated that the zealots in this story, Student Who

You may not have noticed but the sound of a jelly wobbling was recorded for the first time ever in a sound-proof chamber at University College London (UCL) recently. Yes, they recorded the sound of jelly. Why? Obviously there was an architectural jelly banquet (hosted at UCL on July 4th) and they needed a soundtrack for the dancers so they could deliver a spoon-based performance to the music of the wobbling jellies, all accompanied by the aroma of strawberries. It also featured jelly wrestling. Do you ever think that here in America our lives are a little less rich because we don't have a stronger jelly culture? Synchronized dancing. To wobbling jelly. I am reasonably sure I would pay to see that. And there's real science to this, people.

If you get a minute (and if anyone reads my blog - I know, I know, people are here to read the good stuff, not me) say hello to Audrey Amara, our most recent staff science journalist - with articles on things like alcohol powder, you know she will fit right in. And on the programming side, Erik Dobecky has joined us to team up with Sefanja to help us get version 2.0 out the door and generally assist with the re-design so we can take a broad overview of all our features (like these blogs, chat, f

Let's be honest; Nature and AAAS, non-profit or not, have employees and those employees would like to remain so. That requires money and a lot of it. Non-profit has never meant 'free', it just means they can't give money to shareholders - it certainly does not mean charity.

Gordy Slack, writing in The Scientist seems to think so. First things first, I am not in the camp that looks on honest questions as deserving of a declaration of war in that sort of 'you are with us or against us' way the more militant atheist science writers in some places do. So I looked at Slack's piece on its merits and he makes one point I have often made - it isn't just uneducated religious fundamentalists who maintain a belief without knowing what they are talking about. Plenty of atheists do the exact same thing without knowing a thing at all about adaptive radiation. They believe in evolution because scientists do.