This week, personal genome sequencing remains a hot potato. The first sequences from volunteers at George Church’s Personal Genome Project prompted a blog post from Corie Lok, and two forum topics. The interest also follows a recent Editorial in Nature on the commercialization of personal genomics.

So you know the difference between a western and Southern blot, but do you know why one is capitalised and one is not? Steffi Suhr and Maxine Clarke have the answers to this and other typographical questions.

Is blogging dead?, enquires Martin Fenner (notably, in a forum rather than in his blog). Discussion centres around a Wired article opining that blogs are ‘so 2004’. Nature Networkers beg to differ, and offered up a particularly incisive set of blog posts this week.

After the successful launch of India’s first lunar probe, Jeff Marlow discusses the brewing Asian space race, noting how traditional space powers might be left in parking orbit. So what are Americans, seemingly the laggards in the modern incarnation of the Space Race, to make of these space-faring trends? Does the shifting momentum signal a new world order, or is the contest an inconsequential re-run playing 40 years after the original?

Richard Grant argues that modern oncology is in the doldrums. Is it time to say that cancer research—as we know it—doesn’t work? Is it time to divert the majority of scientific effect towards identifying and preventing—or repairing—that initial mutation?

Meanwhile, Viktor Poór conflates cell biology and horror movies in a Hallowe’en cartoon strip, Noah Grey gives the goss on the movers and shakers of neuroscience, and will the next science bloggers’ conference take place on the windswept shores of Cromer?

If you’d like to nominate a conversation you’ve read or taken part in on Nature Network for next week’s roundup, please email us at network [at] nature.com