Blog Crawl Gems

This Week's Treasures

Earth Science Picture of the Day provides a beautiful panorama of the Bonneville Salt Flats, including a very cool salt windrow, followed the next day by a photo of evaporite crystals, taken on the annual public collecting day at Searles Lake.

In keeping with the evaporite theme, The Dynamic Earth posts on Eocene evaporites in southwest Wyoming:  Evaporite Casts in Sandstone.  Check out the gorgeous casts in the Green River Formation.

Sandatlas contemplates why the highest volcanoes are in South America, after not being able to find satisfactory answers on the Web.  The result is a set of diverse, interesting and carefully-explained theories.

Similarly, there are many possibilities to consider in thinking about molecular mechanisms underlying evolution; strict Mendelianism is becoming a thing of the past, as it should.  The most recent addition to my blog list, CHIMERAS, discusses How did that pesky virus end up in our DNA?  (September 11, not recent but I just found it).  Now that we are getting out of the Mendelian cul-de-sac, we can contemplate the multitude of candidate mechanisms, including my favorite: the role of viruses in host evolution (paleovirology).

I'm here to help!
Courtesy API/CR.

Finally, I was happy to find Why Blog at Small Things Considered, part of the celebration of their five-year anniversary.  Merry Youle writes:

“Blogging provides a structure for that exploration ... to find and assemble the pieces needed to tell a story. Eventually a post is written, giving me a sense of completion, and then it is on to the next post.”

For me ... couldn't be more true!