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As you've undoubtedly noticed by now, we've reached more than 1,000,000 comments on our network! W00t! 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…

Well, we've done it. Just over one year has passed since we hit 500,000 comments, and now, September 16, 2008, at 8:32 a.m. Eastern Time, we've reached 1,000,000. Hooray! Check out the ScienceBlogs homepage throughout the day; we'll be rotating some of what we thought were the best of the million…

As everybody's talking about, the snazzy new version of ResearchBlogging.org launched on Tuesday. Powered by Seed Media Group Technology, ResearchBlogging now has a host of new features, including multi-language capability, subject-specific RSS feeds, and profiles of registered users.…

I'm blogging live from a very hot Austin, Texas, at the Netroots Nation conference! 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…

ScienceBlogs is, without question, the largest online conversation about science. We have 71 blogs, almost 70,000 posts and 850,000 comments. How does one reader keep up?! One of the easiest ways is to subscribe to the ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap, a fun email newsletter that summarizes the previous…

Last week, a bunch of sciblings wrote about a study from Purdue psychologists suggesting that high consumption of artificial sweeteners is linked to obesity. In the study—published in Behavioral Neuroscience in February—rats fed a sugar substitute gained significantly more weight than those fed…

Last week, the ScienceBloggers wrote about a new study in Nature in which scientists tracked the cellphone habits of 100,000 Europeans and found that people rarely strayed from familiar locations—their homes and workplaces. It made me wonder....Are our readers homebodies, too? Click Here for…

Everybody loves those Mac commercials...you know, with Mac and PC anthropomorphized? (Greg Laden's got a few spoofs with Ms. Linux, too.) 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…

After a 10-month, 420-million-mile journey, NASA's Phoenix probe touched down on Mars' northern Arctic Circle at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time Sunday, becoming the first to ever successfully reach a polar region of the Red Planet. And boy are the ScienceBloggers excited! For the next three months, Phoenix…

Monday night, the British Parliament voted on embryo science laws for the first time in nearly 20 years. After weeks of debate, the House of Commons voted 336 to 176 to reject a proposed ban on the use of human-animal hybrid embryos in scientific research. Human-animal hybrids were first created…

Despite An Inconvenient Truth's Oscar win and Al Gore's Nobel, public opinion of global warming has changed little since the film's release in 2006. As Matt Nisbet recently pointed out: "Conventional wisdom pegged Gore's film and media campaign as changing the nature of the debate in the public's…

Where do you do science? Seed Magazine wants to know. We've all seen the stereotypical pictures of a science lab: microscopes and petri dishes sitting atop sterile work benches; electric circuits sunk in a mess of metal wires and batteries; equations scribbled on blackboards. But we also know that…

Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) with a vote of 414 to 1. Lauded by most media pundits as an example of "forward-looking" legislation, the bill forbids companies from viewing the genetic profiles of their clients or…

About a week ago, ScienceBlogger Randy Olson (documentary filmmaker of "Flock of Dodos" fame) left a comment on Shifting Baselines suggesting that the best way to combat anti-science propaganda like "Expelled" is with a pro-science film festival. "Right now, if a high school kid makes a really…

Of the 83 bloggers currently featured on ScienceBlogs.com, 20 write under pseudonyms. Since many of our bloggers frequently write about highly scientific and/or highly controversial topics, some wondered: But but...Can anonymous bloggers be trusted?! On a non-ScienceBlog (gasp!) Greg Laden…

Last Wednesday, Nature released the results of an informal survey about cognitive enhancers—drugs known to improve concentration and counteract fatigue. Twenty percent of the 1,400 international respondents said they had used cognitive enhancers (such as Ritalin and beta blockers) for non-medical…

About six months ago, I started a book club with a bunch of my girl friends. So far, we've only read three books. But despite the infrequency of our meetings, the club has been both fun and intellectually fulfilling. Anyway, the whole experience got me thinking about the popularity of book clubs.…

This week, Jane of See Jane Compute considered the question: Is computer science really a science? She wrote: The more I thought about it, the more I realized how complex this question really is...Computer science is in many respects a tool. It's a discipline that has its reach into many other…

On March 19, the prolific British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died at age 90. At his 90th birthday party, in December, Clarke made three wishes: for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources, for a lasting peace in his adopted home, Sri Lanka, and for evidence of extraterrestrial…

On Friday, 3/14, math enthusiasts worldwide celebrated π Day, in honor of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (approximately 3.14). Back in August, Chad asked his readers which irrational number they preferred, π or e—the base for the exponential function (approximately 2.72). He…

Today, March 14th (3.14, get it?), math geeks around the world are celebrating pi. Seed's NYC headquarters did, too, with--what else?--pie!

Prismatic Soap Bubble ScienceBlogs fans will have surely noticed the stunning images featured on our Life Science, Physical Science (above), Environment, Humanities and Technology channels. They're taken from On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science, by Harvard organic…

PZ Myers turned 51 on Sunday. His blog, Pharyngula, is one of our network's most popular, with a impressive Technorati ranking of 2,491. So this week's poll is for the PZ fanatics: How many reader comments has Pharyngula received since joining ScienceBlogs (as of March 10)? Click Here for…

(Many thanks to Ed for the photo!)

In 1986, 22-year-old Boston Celtics forward Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose. This week, DrugMonkey argued that Bias' death—as opposed to educational programs like DARE—was the major reason why self-reported rates of cocaine use by 20-year-olds dropped from 20% in the mid-1980s to 7% in the…

It's winter. And here in NYC, that means it's cold, icy, and generally miserable. Everyone I know is coughing, aching, sneezing, and blowing noses. Ten million sick readers undoubtedly want to know the answer to our latest "Ask A ScienceBlogger" question: What is a Disease? Four scibling responses…

(This is a guest post written by Mo, the Neurophilosopher.) I'm very pleased to announce that the fantastic Bioephemera has been "acquired" by ScienceBlogs. When I first started reading it, I knew that I had found a unique blog, and it soon became one of my favourites. (More below the fold...)…

Take just five minutes to complete our ScienceBlogs reader survey and you'll be entered in a drawing to win a Seed iPod Nano! All survey responses are completely anonymous, and results will be used in the aggregate only. Thanks, and good luck! (Photo from Flickr, by riot jane)

At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, while chatting with Canadian parliament member Scott Brison, Seed Magazine's founder and editor-in-chief Adam Bly lamented the Canadian prime minister's recent decision to fire the country's science adviser, Arthur Carty. Shocked by the news, Brison…

Today Page 3.14 interviews the anonymous PhysioProf, who writes (along with the anonymous DrugMonkey) at our new blog DrugMonkey. (For more about the blog, see Abel's introductory post.) PP's responses here are short and sweet—which is odd considering what's supposedly PP's "most marked…