Job application season is heating up this year, so the review of the book, The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology, is timely in this week’s Nature.

Written by Harvard’s Pam Silver (who directs the relatively new systems biology graduate program at the medical school), the review says the book doles out lots of practical advice, such as how to give a good seminar and how to navigate the interview process. Silver says the book doesn’t delve into the larger questions of whether this hiring system is the best one for picking the right people and doesn’t consider other important factors such as unfairness, bad luck, and bad choices.

And the cover of Nature features the research of a Harvard group led by Martin Nowak looking at the evolution of language. Erez Lieberman, a postdoc at Harvard/MIT/Broad, and his colleagues took a mathematical approach to studying how the frequency of use of certain English words can affect how those words evolve over time. They found that the more frequently irregular verbs (verbs that don’t have an -ed form of the past tense) were used in Old English, the slower was their evolution into the -ed form in Modern English. That is, irregular verbs that were/are so commonly used, like “go”, “do” and “say” have stayed irregular, while less commonly used verbs more quickly became regularized over time.

This is comparable to the way some important genes tend to evolve less. (From Nature news, which includes a skeptical quote at the end from Steven Pinker.)