Do bloggers in general, and those of us who write about current scientific research in particular, have an obligation to our readers?

The obligation to accurately describe and interpret the results at hand is a given. But do we also have a duty to continue to engage with our readers? To answer the same questions over and over again, even when it’s clear that it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to the commenter’s beliefs?

Even when it’s been almost a year and we’re heartily sick of it?

Yes, I’m talking about a specific blog post. And yes, I’m hoping that your comments will help me to justify not spending hours and hours answering more questions. But I am truly ambivalent about this issue and would like your honest opinions!

I spent most of yesterday trying to make my garden look like less of a disgrace. My mother-in-law’s patented “let’s see the positive at all times” observation that “your garden looks so colourful!” made me realise that it really was time to get rid of some of the hundreds of dandelions, and get my seeds in at the same time. (I know it’s probably the wrong time of year – but then I take a Darwinian approach to growing vegetables. Plant all the seeds at once and the ones that survive will obviously be the best (and hopefully tastiest) specimens).

I filled an entire bin full of the thousands of dandelions and other assorted weeds; dug in some satisfyingly dark, rich compost; transplanted my tomato plants; seeded courgettes, onions, peas and cucumbers in the aforementioned haphazard fashion; and, due to the inconvenient ban on using Agent Orange, had to tackle the lawn with our trusty, rusty old push-mower.

The exercise brought up some questions:

During my six years in Canada, I have had the pleasure of sending many forms, documents and letters, not to mention lots of hard-earned cash, to the following address:

Consulate General of Canada
Immigration Regional Program Centre
3000 HSBC Center
Buffalo, New York

Notice anything strange there?

Holy shit, this photo’s real?!

A few people had sent it to me, but I thought it was a PhotoShop job.

...but the olfactory resemblence of your mother to elderberries remains unverified by modern science.

Here’s a rare gem from this week’s local news.

A few years ago, a body emerged from a melting glacier in Northern BC. When I first heard this story I inevitably thought of Oetzi, the Austrian iceman, but the BC remains turned out to be much more contemporary. Kwaday Dan Ts’inchi (“long-ago person found” in the local language) may have been born as recently as the early 18th century.

So what can this find tell us about the life and times of Kwaday Dan Ts’inchi?

Luckily for my sanity, this week’s email alerts from Nature News are much more interesting than the ones I’ve been getting from Google. Today’s offering concerns new guidelines from the Swiss government’s ethics committee. All relevant grant applications must now contain a statement about the project’s impact on the dignity of the research subjects.

Those of us who work on grant applications that involve human or other animal subjects are used to this kind of thing. But our plant biotechnologist colleagues? Not so much.

Yep, as if submitting grants wasn’t stressful enough already, Swiss biotechnologists now need to consider Plant Dignity in their applications.

Maybe they could start by defining it.

I wonder if the comments on this article will get as crazy as these ones on a Nature News article about induced pluripotent stem cells. Thanks to Kyrsten Jensen for sending me the link to this very entertaining exchange, which degenerated into name calling, extensive comment moderation, and a stern reprimand from Nature staff.

Apparently Liz Hurley may be pregnant.

The reason I know about this riveting story is that it broke when she attended a charity benefit. The charity happens to fund the work of one of the PIs in my department, and its name is therefore on my Google news alerts list.

If I get one more email about Liz Hurley this week I’m either going to throw my computer out of the window or be fired for misuse of network bandwidth.

It’s not quite as bad as when I worked on the Jun family of proteins and would receive random alerts about papers published in the month of June.

With the exception of two years on the dark side¹, my entire career has been spent in cancer research. Both the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, where I did my PhD, and the place in which I did my postdoc and now find myself working once again², are funded primarily through charitable donations.

People in both places are exceedingly grateful for the support they receive, but staff attitudes to reciprocal funding differ enormously.

Full stops¹ at the end of bullet pointed text: yes or no?

I just realised that half of my slides have them, and half don’t. I went through and added punctuation to the lines that were missing it, went for a cup of tea, then came back and deleted all the full stops again.

The presentation has to be sent to my supervisor within the next 80 minutes…
_
1. Periods, if you’re in North America. Dots, wherever you are.

Welcome!

I’ve been haunting the Nature Network for a few months now, and haven’t seen any other carnivals hosted here in that time. I may have missed a carnival post somewhere along the way, but in an effort to be the hostess with the mostest, I’d better make the pertinent introductions to make sure that we all play nicely and everyone has a good time.

Nature Network, meet the Tangled Bank . One of the broadest blog carnivals around, it is named after Charles Darwin’s famous metaphor¹ and features articles from across the fields of science and medicine. Reading a carnival gives you access to posts you might never stumble across by yourself; contributing to a carnival brings your work to a whole new audience. Submit your posts to the next edition, why don’t you!

Tangled Bank, meet the Nature Network – it’s like a sensible, grown-up Facebook for scientists, with the added bonus that your workplace probably hasn’t banned it. Use the headings above to find people you know, groups and forums of like-minded scientists, and a whole heap of excellent blogs. If you live in London or Boston , you get even more features to play with. If you live in Canada, you get to join my group .

Let the tangling begin!