New on...

Food:

Where's the schmaltz? Look no further...
How religious curbs lead to great food (take with a grain of salt....and pepper and garlic).
My mother's sarma recipe will come shortly...

Drink:

Ask the expert on vodka: Just Like Water, But Better
What are you drinking tonight at midnight? The Friday Fermentable: Champagne and Sparkling Wines for New Year's
Good news for the liver cirrhosis (and the grapevine genome): Eat, Drink and Be Merry (but Not Too Much)

Books:

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (which I have reviewed ealrier this year) is now available, in its entirety, on the Web, for free (thanks Richard Ackerman)
Is There Another Harry Potter Book on the Way?

Golden Compass:

Henry did not like the movie: On Religious Allegory and Talking Animals
Amanda loved the books: Review: His Dark Materials Trilogy
(You may recall my own take on the movie: Golden Compass - it's about sex, really)

Sports:

Even Gregg Favalora understands American Football better than I do: Exclusive Coverage of Evidently Quite Important Sporting Match

Journalism:

Andy Oram: So when will the job of a technical editor be abolished?
Jay Rosen: Most of them are not ideologically driven; they just want to get on the front page (via Ed Cone).
Chris Bowers: Moderately Lobotomized: The Closing Of The American Pundit's Mind
Matt Nisbet: Horse Race Coverage & the Political Spectacle
Digby: Bipartisan Zombies

Science, Society and Culture:

The OpenLab 07 anthology entries have been judged and the final 50 (plus a poem and a cartoon) will be revealed here in a couple of days - stay tuned.
Science Is Now... Cool
Global Warming will bring strange diseases to the U.S.: Why "neglected tropical diseases" are going to bite us in the *$&# and Neglected Diseases and Poverty in 'The Other America': The Greatest Health Disparity in the United States? kinda go together.
Revisiting my sex predictions for 2007
It's not that expensive, though I may still prefer to be turned into silage for a tree - The Neptune Memorial Reef .
A strange history of the telephone. And to think that Alexander Graham Bell was a hero to me when I was a kid!

Cool Science News:

A newly-discovered virus is threatening endangered western barred bandicoots. Anne-Marie and Jeremy Bruno comment.
Brian Switek: Evolution's Arrow. Long and thoughtful. A must read.

Science 2.0:

Attila: Science.TV joins the club but exactly which? and Matt Thurling on the concept of science.TV
Euan Edie: Open notebook pt1, Open notebook pt2 - question, theories, approach and Open notebook - what's a disease again?
Presentations from the Publishing in the New Millennium conference at Harvard, are now available as MP3s (and some PDFs) (hat-tip: Peter Suber)
The new journal Neuroethics is really Free Access and not Open Acces in the true sense of the term: New free journal from Springer - but no Open Data

Politics:

The Airport Security Follies and Follies d'Air and Airport Security and Liquid Contraband
Atrios, Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers endorse John Edwards.
A nice article on Steve Gilliard in the NYTimes. Driftglass, Jesse and Amanda comment.
Paul Rosenberg has a series of excellent posts on the Myth of Bipartisanship and Polarization: Martin Luther King and The Moral Imperative For Polarization, The Myth Of A Polarized Public, Collapsing The Ideological Overlap: The Gulf Between Issues and Candidates, Sorting By Party--Polarization By Party Without Polarization of People, Geographic Polarization: Myth Vs. Reality and Elite-Mass Polarization: 30+ Years of Guns Vs. Butter.

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Thanks so much for posting the link to the PLoS article on neglected tropical diseases and poverty in America-I never would have seen it otherwise, and it covers an extremely important health and social (in)justice issue. I'd love to see more coverage of this and similar issues on Science Blogs in 2008.

I also enjoyed your links and posts for food-related topics, but I'm disappointed that there aren't more such posts, at Science Blogs as a whole, on food and nutrition. Occasionally the excellent medical blogs (Orac's, and the denialism blog, for example) will cover obesity and nutrition issues, but I'd like to see more, from additional perspectives. Food topics could be covered from the scientific angles of nutrition and obesity, cultural practices and beliefs, archaeology, agriculture, biochemistry, the "locavore" movement (e.g. Alice Waters, Barbara Kingsolver), geopolitical distribution trends, environmental impact, etc. There could be posts on peer-reviewed papers as well.

Would love to see a new food and nutrition science blog for 2008!

There are 'Food' categories on World Fair and on my blog.

Thanks! I looked up some older Food posts at World's Fair (didn't start reading that blog until very recently, I think with the post on the sustainable gingerbread houses) and at your blog. I still think a science blog devoted to food, nutrition, and agriculture would be fun, though...would probably be best with several editors, each of whom had different expertise.