To celebrate, from September 14-29, our bloggers are setting up parties all over the U.S. and abroad. Click on the map below to see if there’s a party near you.

Below the fold is the complete list of where the parties are happening, arranged by date. Check back often for links to party photos and film footage! (**Last update: 10/20**)

Tuesday, September 16:

Join Abbie Smith in Oklahoma City, OK. (See Abbie’s photos!)

Wednesday, September 17:

Tim Lambert and Dan MacArthur in Sydney, Australia. (See their photos!)

Thursday, September 18:

Join PZ Myers and Greg Laden in the Twin Cities, MN. (*updated location!)

Join Dave Ng and Jennifer Jacquet in Vancouver, Canada.


*See video footage of the Vancouver party*

Saturday, September 20:

Join Abel Pharmboy, James Hrynyshyn, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Dave and Greta Munger, Scicurious, ScienceWoman, Kevin Zelnio and Bora Zivkovic at the Asheboro Zoo in NC.




*See video footage and photos of the North Carolina party*

Join Nick Anthis, Kara Contreary, Mo Costandi, Selvakumar Ganesan, and Ed Yong in London, England.


*See video footage of the London party*

Monday, September 22:

Tara Smith and Evil Monkey in Iowa City, IA.

Friday, September 26:

Join Andrew Bleiman, Benny Bleiman, Craig McClain, Razib, Josh Rosenau, and Janet Stemwedel in San Francisco, CA.



*See photos of the San Francisco party*

Saturday, September 27:

Join Dave Bacon, Maria Brumm, GrrlScientist, and Sandra Porter in Seattle, WA.



*See photos and video footage of the Seattle party*

Alice Pawley and Steve Higgins in Champaign, IL.



*See photos of the Champaign party*

Sunday, September 28:

Join Karmen in Arvada, CO.



*See video footage of the Colorado party*

Zuska in Philadelphia, PA.




*See video footage of the Philadelphia party*

Monday, September 29:

Join Blake Stacey, the Boston Skeptics, and a surprise speaker (!) in Boston, MA.

Tuesday, October 7

Join GrrlScientist, Ginny Hughes, Erin Johnson, Logan Elsass, PhysioProf, and Jake Young in New York City.


*See photos from the New York party*

Check out the ScienceBlogs homepage throughout the day; we’ll be rotating some of what we thought were the best of the million.

If you’re near a major city (or even a not-so-major city), you may be able to check out of the 15 reader parties that various ScienceBloggers are throwing throughout the world. See the line-up here.

If you leave a comment before September 30, don’t forget to enter in the ScienceBlogs comment contest. Top prize is an all-expenses paid trip to the Big Apple for a science adventure.

ResearchBlogging was the brain child of Dave Munger, a writer, a science educator, and half of the genius behind our most popular psychology blog, Cognitive Daily. (That’s Dave at right, hiking in Pasayten Wilderness in Washington State, the largest wilderness area in the lower 48 states.)

We sat down with Dave in New York last week to find out more about how he came up with the idea for ResearchBlogging (hint: a nun’s involved) and what’s in store for the project in the coming months. Check out the full interview below the fold…

How did you come up with the idea for ResearchBlogging?

That’s a long story. Greta and I started Cognitive Daily by only blogging about peer-reviewed research. A couple of years ago, we decided we wanted to expand and cover things that weren’t strictly about peer-reviewed research, like links to news articles, polls, that kind of thing. But we had a large base of readers and we didn’t want to alienate them by adding this other content. So, we developed our own icon that indicated that it was a post about peer-reviewed research.

Then, a nun, actually, Sister Edith Bogue, who’s a professor of sociology at the College of St. Scholastica, emailed me and asked if she could use our icon on her blog because she did the same thing: sometimes she posted about peer-reviewed sociology research, and sometimes she posted about her vacation or what she was doing with her students that week in class, whatever. I said to her, well you can do that, but our icon is designed specifically for our site: It’s got a little cog on it, it doesn’t really make sense for other people to use it. And she said, well wouldn’t it be great, though, if there was one icon that anybody could use to distinguish their posts? And I said, yeah that would be great. That’s how the idea started.

At the beginning it was just an icon, there was no ResearchBlogging.org at that point. We had a contest to design the icon, and there were some, um, controversial results to the contest. But we finally came up with our icon, and there was this discussion online about this. People realized it would not be that difficult to create a single central website where all of those people who used the icon would be in one place.

Did you do the coding for the first version of the site?

No. The first version of the site was completely designed and developed by an undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Zachary Tong. And he did a great job for somebody who was really busy–he was working in a lab almost full time and was a full-time student. So he did it all on his spare time. It’s really amazing what he did. Since then, Seed called us and offered to take over. So they’ve been working on this second generation that we launched on Tuesday.

So it took off right away? Give us some raw stats.

Over 400 bloggers registered for the first version of the site, including 43 ScienceBloggers and three bloggers from ScienceBlogs.de. There have been over 1,700 posts and we average about 15 posts a day, which is more than twice as much as what the NYT puts out in a day.

And what will those numbers be a year from now?

Well, we’ll see! One feature that’s added in the new version is the ability to import older posts. So now people can go back into their backlogs if they want to feature something that’s still relevant they can. I think that within the next month, we’ll probably double the number of posts easily. I think we’ll significantly increase the user base as well. We’ve never really publicized the site until now.

Will ResearchBlogging always be limited to just science?

Not in principle. Now it’s just science because that’s the network that we have right now. Scientists write about peer-reviewed journal articles a lot, just kind of casually, naturally. Now I’m trying to think about how we might change the definition of what qualifies as “Research Blogging” depending on the discipline, because I really want to encompass all fields.

In English [blogs], for example, which I’m familiar with because I actually started as a literature blogger, people tend to read a new novel by somebody who’s really well known and then they’ll offer their review of that novel. The novel’s obviously not peer-reviewed literature, but if you have an English professor who’s offering analysis of a book by a Nobel prize-winning author, then I think that’s at least the equivalent of a graduate student writing an analysis of a journal article that showed up in the Journal of Particle Physics or something. (No offense to particle physicists!)

Officially, Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos) “amplifies progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and learning how to be more effective in using technology to influence the public debate.”

They’re certainly right about that free exchange of ideas—I’ve eaten free pastries from an Oregonian who’s running for Senate (thanks, Jeff Merkley!), chatted with a physicist who used to work with Carl Sagan (and yes, the legendary astronomer was apparently just as charismatic in real life), argued with an obnoxious Greenpeace worker about “simple” energy policies, and even shielded my eyes from an anti-vaccination group (paging Orac!).

Yesterday, my ScienceBlogs booth attracted the likes of bonafide blogosphere celebrities Ed Brayton, Josh Rosenau, and Darksyde.

The day capped off with fantastic keynote speeches by bonafide non-blogosphere celebrities General Wesley Clark and Governor Howard Dean.

Today I’m looking forward to Ed Brayton’s panel on “Restructuring US Science Policy.” And one of these nights, we’re all going out for real Texas BBQ. So stay tuned for more updates!

One of the easiest ways is to subscribe to the ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap, a fun email newsletter that summarizes the previous week’s happenings.

Find out more ways to read—with and without RSS feeds—below the fold.

If RSS feeds aren’t your thing, then I’d suggest starting on the ScienceBlogs homepage and checking out: the Buzz (the topic that’s featured at the very top of the page); and a bit further down the page, the “Top 5″ lists. The “Most Active” list gives the most popular posts, traffic-wise, which tend to be newsworthy. The “Readers’ Picks” list shows what some selected readers like best on the site.

If you’re just interested in the latest posts published on the network, click on the “Last 24 Hours” button on the top left of the homepage.

If you’d like to focus on specific scientific subfields, then click on the appropriate “channel” buttons listed along the left side of the homepage.

If you’re hip to the RSS mania, then it’s even easier to keep up with Sb content. Our site has several different feeds:

Sb Combined Feed
Have a few hours to kill? This feed gives you every single post written on the Sb network, which averages to at least 100 per day.

Sb Select Feed
These are posts that the bloggers have chosen as their very best. They’re usually meaty posts, with news analysis or interesting commentary, rather than LOL photos or links to other sites.

Sb News Feed
These are posts that the bloggers have designated as having a “newsy” tone. This feed is much less populated than the others, but if you’re not into ranting and raving, this is the one for you.

Channel Feeds
Each of our channels has its own feed, which are all listed here.

Happy reading!

Not gonna lie: As someone who consumes those sweet yellow packets in high numbers, I was somewhat alarmed by these results. (Not that I’ve decreased my intake since, of course.)

Are y’all as addicted as I am?

Want to know the results? We’ll publish them exclusively in next week’s ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top posts, quotes, photos and videos from the previous week on ScienceBlogs. (Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.)

(Image by slopjop)

It made me wonder….Are our readers homebodies, too?

Want to know the results? We’ll publish them exclusively in next week’s ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top posts, quotes, photos and videos from the previous week on ScienceBlogs. (Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.)

Many of the ScienceBloggers swear by Macs and the Mac OX operating system. Others say that they have to use Windows for a lot of specialized lab software. I thought it’d be an interesting poll for a larger audience, as I’m sure many of you are working in labs much of the time.

So, which operating system do you use the most often?

Want to know the results? We’ll publish them exclusively in next week’s ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top posts, quotes, photos and videos from the previous week on ScienceBlogs. (Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.)

For the next three months, Phoenix will dig into the soil to find out if its composition is–or was ever–suitable for life.

Humans have wondered about finding life “out there” for millennia. What do you think–is it possible?

Want to know the results? We’ll publish them exclusively in next week’s ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top posts, quotes, photos and videos from the previous week on ScienceBlogs. (Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.)

Human-animal hybrids were first created in 2003, by Chinese scientists who fused human cells with rabbit eggs. In 2004, researchers in Minnesota created pigs with pig-human blood cells.

So far, this kind of research has been banned in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

Do you agree with Parliament’s decision?

Want to know the results? We’ll publish them exclusively in next week’s ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top posts, quotes, photos and videos from the previous week on ScienceBlogs. (Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.)