In science, almost everyone is obsessed with what the “best” journals are and how to get their papers in those journals. I argue that some...

The Soapbox Science blog at Nature looks at science marketing hits for 2012. I want to add crowdfunding to that list. The #OverlyHonestM...

Spot the crustacean! There’s an ostracod on this aquarium bloom. Find it? Here, let me help: Photos by eclectic echoes on Flickr ...

Fellow comics fans will probably know that Peter David , self-proclaimed “writer of stuff” recently had a stroke . While on Christmas vacati...

Next Saturday, 19 January 2013, at 10 am, I will be giving a talk for the general public at the South Padre Island World Birding Center . Th...

“Can you hear me in the back?” If you’re asking because you want to know if you need to use the microphone, forget about the audience’s ...

The SICB conference this year was probably a good example of how ambivalent scientific societies are to the online world. First, the on...

(Crossposted from Marmorkrebs blog ) I spent my last day at SICB in the session I was speaking in... crayfish! The special session at SI...

On Sunday, I saw biologists making do with lab tape, sunscreen, and “Wet and wild black matte fingernail polish.” There is still a lot of ro...

Damnit, where’s the version for my Android phone? I Can Haz Cheeseburger dubbed this the most impactical iPhone case ever. Challenge ac...

It's nice to have a fitness center in a hotel. But you have to be willing to swallow your pride and do the walk of embarrassment from yo...

Ah, the first day of a conference, when the first talks in the day might actually get some people showing up. I spent the morning in ...

Given my woes traveling in 2012, I've been nervous making the trip to San Francisco. My first scare was that my flight to Houston was ov...

Would you work on a project that you expected would not be cited for years? I've had a couple of main lines of research for a good chu...

There are different schools of thought about giving a species its scientific name, and what that scientific name should reflect. Personally,...

Daniel Sarewitz in Nature argues that American scientists are at risk of making themselves politically ineffective, because so many of the...

A fairly popular theme among scientists in academia is to change what scientists are rewarded for. One of the most recent was by Gary Marcus...

This image was one of Olympus’s BioScapes contest : But this fearsome claw doesn’t do justice to the whole animal: This is a crust...

Reaction Norm examines the phone interview process for academic jobs, and, in another post, addresses the common question of how a candidat...

The first word that came to my mind when thinking of my publishing this year was "waiting." I didn't publish as much science...