We don't normally like to highlight people funnier than we are but we have to make an exception here - we mean Lee Silver, of course, not Stephen Colbert, though he might be pretty funny also.

Taped last summer, now you can get the six-minute lesson on stem cell research, how science is threatened by the left and the right, and why sometimes "mother nature is a real nasty bitch."

I discovered the Scientific Blogging site while preparing the next episode of my Books and Ideas Podcast , which is going to be a discussion of Dr. Lee M. Silver 's excellent book Challenging Nature . Therefore, I must admit that I am more of a podcaster than blogger.

Snail-racing is an action-packed spectator sport compared to watching the drift of Earth’s continents, which usually move just a few centimetres a year – about as fast as fingernails grow. But occasionally events quicken dramatically, and become interesting enough for a "desk-bound geophysicist" like Dr Tim Wright to pack his bags and go camel-trekking across a desert.

The chemical bond between carbon and fluorine is one of the strongest in nature, and has been both a blessing and a curse in the complex history of fluorocarbons.

A team of researchers from the UAB's Mutagenesis Group, led by Dr Jordi Surrallés, has identified one of the mechanisms used by cancer cells to resist chemotherapy.

In his paper, to be published in The EMBO Jorunal, Dr Surrallés describes how proteins of the Fanconi/BRCA pathway recognise the presence of genetic mutations in order to repair them. The researchers also found that alteration of this mechanism makes tumour cells much more sensitive to certain drugs. This discovery will make it possible to develop strategies to make tumours more vulnerable to chemotherapy.

It is a vision of information technology to store data in the smallest available units - single atoms - thus enabling the development of novel mass storage devices with huge capacities but compact dimensions. It is crucial to understand the mutual interaction and dynamics of individual spins, both for realising such a visionary device as well as to explore the limits of conventional mass storage media. New insights into these interactions can find direct application in the advancement of magnetic recording techniques as well as in the development of novel spin-based information technologies such as quantum computers.

There are many galaxies of different shapes and sizes around us today. Roughly half are gas-poor elliptical-shaped galaxies with little new star formation activity, and half are gas-rich spiral and irregular galaxies with high star formation activity. Observations have shown that gas-poor galaxies are most often found near the centre of crowded galaxy clusters, whereas spirals spend most of their lifetime in solitude.

[Note to scientific blogging readers:  I posted the following column on my other blog, www.evolutionshift.com in the first week of 2007. Since I write here under Future Thought under the category Culture, I thought it appropriate that I should post these predictions.  When people hear that I am a future thinker or futurist they always ask me for predictions.

I have made absolutely no changes to this column and am posting it exactly as I posted it in early January.  So far these predictions seem to have some accuracy, but the real test is to read this column in December and call it out either way.]

As we have seen, penis size matters to female mice and sword size matters to female swordfish but brain size in humans barely gets noticed at all. It's what you do with it that counts.

The ability to hit a baseball or play a piano well is part practice and part innate talent. One side of the equation required for skilled performances has its roots in the architecture of the brain genetically determined before birth, say scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.