The science blogosphere is shrinking and growing at the same time. Today, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) starts a new network called PLoS Blogs. A nonprofit publisher of open-access journals focused on biological sciences, PLoS will fold its three existing blogs under its new network, managed by Brian Mossop (the author of a recent Mind Matters column on fatherhood here).
 
Consisting of 11 blogs by scientists and journalists (including one by John Rennie, former editor in chief of Scientific American, and Melinda Wenner Moyer, a frequent Sci Am contributor), it joins several other relatively small networks launched this summer, including those by the Guardian, Wired and Scientopia. The RSS feeds of these and other science blog networks appear in the aggregator site scienceblogging.org, founded by blog pioneers Anton Zuiker, Bora Zivkovic and Dave Munger.

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For decades, apocalyptic environmentalists (and others) have warned of humanity's imminent doom, largely as a result of our unsustainable use of and impact upon the natural systems of the planet. After all, the most recent comprehensive assessment of so-called ecosystem services—benefits provided for free by the natural world, such as clean water and air—found that 60 percent of them are declining.

Yet, at the exact same time, humanity has never been better. Our numbers continue to swell, life expectancy is on the rise, child mortality is declining, and the rising tide of economic growth is lifting most boats.

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The middle-aged Internet (ARPANET first went live more than 40 years ago) could easily slide into complacency, but the National Science Foundation (NSF) might be staving this off with four multimillion-dollar grants that the agency has recently awarded. The Future Internet Architecture (FIA) research projects are expected to re-think the network from the ground up, taking into account emerging security concerns, the demand for greater bandwidth and the growth of mobile devices.

The Internet's original design accounts primarily for information to be passed from one host server to another along a wired network. Attempts to secure these hosts and networks have come as an afterthought (ARPANET was originally a closed network) and have struggled to keep pace with society's expanding economic and social reliance on the Internet. Likewise, the host-based architecture (where computers seek access to information from a specific server or group of servers) is starting to look creaky as the number of computers and mobile devices seeking access multiplies exponentially each year.

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Okay, here's one for the annals, something that is going to make it even more difficult for evolutionary psychology to get the respect the field thinks it deserves.

A controversial academic from the London School of Economics has recently penned a blog post for Psychology Today called "If Barack Obama Is Christian, Michael Jackson Was White." Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist who gained attention (I'm not sure fame is the right word) for various outlandish claims, including the assertion that low intelligence is the basis for poverty and disease in places like Africa, drawing critics who suggested that he was trying to lend legitimacy to the faux science of eugenics. His blog, "The Scientific Fundamentalist: A Look at the Hard Truths About Human Nature," has recently featured entries on topics such as why men go through midlife crises. (Answer: "From an evolutionary psychological perspective, a man's midlife crisis is precipitated by his wife's imminent menopause and the end of her reproductive career…" Sic. No, very sic.)

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Researchers have pieced together a set of puzzling fossils from a stocky dinosaur discovered in Romania. The newly described predator helps to flesh out the spotty fossil record of carnivorous animals from Europe's Cretaceous.

The dinosaur, Balaur bondoc, was a sharp-clawed theropod that lived among small island creatures when sea levels were high and the continent of Europe was a series of islands, some 60 million years ago.

"The morphology is so weird we didn't have any idea where to fit them," Zoltan Csiki, of the University of Bucharest, said in a prepared statement. Csiki and colleagues described the new species in a study published online August 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but can knowing its genetic secrets help feed the nine billion people expected on this planet by 2050? Scientists hope so, especially considering they have added wheat this week to the list of crops that have had their genetic instruction set read.

Wheat, which is a grass, might seem like a simple sequencing task, but the crop actually has a genome five times bigger than a human's three billion DNA base pairs. Scientists from the U.K. released the list of the genetics of the Chinese spring wheat variety online on August 27 in a bid to "increase the efficiency of breeding new crop varieties," said team member Keith Edwards of the University of Bristol in a statement.

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It looks like a solar-powered treadmill, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) say they have created a flat, conveyor belt–like device that could clean up oil slicks far more efficiently than anything used at the Deepwater Horizon site. They key is a nanoparticle-infused, water-repelling mesh coating a conveyor belt. As important is the device's ability to work autonomously as part of a larger team of devices, which M.I.T. calls a Seaswarm.

Members of M.I.T.'s Senseable City Lab, which made a name for itself a year ago through its Trash Track program for keeping tabs on discarded electronics, will present their Seaswarm research—as well as a video demonstrating a prototype in action—Saturday at Italy's Venice Biennale international art, music and architecture festival. Venice Biennale's theme this year is how nanotechnology will change the way people live in 2050.

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The benefits of breast-feeding for babies have proved to be myriad, and an increasing number of studies are finding long-term health benefits for mothers, too, including reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and lower odds of some cancers.

A new analysis confirms earlier observations that breast-feeding helps to decrease a mother's risk of developing type 2 diabetes, and suggests that even a single month of lactation can serve a protective effect. Many major U.S. medical organizations currently recommend breast-feeding infants for at least six months.

Researchers behind the new work found that mothers who did not breast-feed at all had about twice the chance of developing type 2 diabetes than mothers who did, even after controlling for other factors, such as age, race and health history. Twenty-seven percent of the mothers who reported not having breast-fed for at least a month had developed type 2 diabetes.

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This Sunday, August 29, is the fifth anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, which touched off one of the most egregious and most publicized tragedies in modern American history. Scientific American published an article in 2001 that predicted precisely the kind of destruction the storm wrought, based on computer models of hurricane paths and storm surges. Unfortunately, politicians and engineers responsible for flood protection did not listen to the scientists who were running the models. After 1,400 people died in the wake of Katrina and the nation’s pitiful emergency response, Louisiana and the federal government convened several independent panels of scientists and engineers to propose ways to better protect New Orleans and the entire Mississippi Delta from future hurricanes.

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Why do the roiling, black clouds of a thunderstorm produce lightning? Ben Franklin and others helped prove that such lightning was discharged electricity, but what generates that electricity in such prodigious quantities? After all, storms generate millions of lightning bolts around the globe every year—even volcanoes can get in on the act as the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull did when photographs captured bolts of blue in the ash cloud.

Perhaps surprisingly, scientists still debate how exactly lightning forms; theories range from colliding slush and ice particles in convective clouds to, more speculatively, a rain of charged solar particles seeding the skies with electrical charge. Or perhaps  the uncertainty about lightning formation is not surprising, given all that remains unknown about clouds and the perils of studying a storm—an electrical discharge can deliver millions of joules of energy in milliseconds.

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