As you can see, things are changing around here at Element List. We're redesigning the site and adding some new features. The new features will allow members to create personal profiles, save a personal favorite link list, and meet and chat with other members. The member feature will be integrated with a new forum section (coming soon) that will allow members to chat openly online. We've also moved the Element List blog to the new section you see here running under Movable Type software, which will have all the features that you've come to expect with blogs: tags, trackbacks, RSS, etc.

Let us know what you like, don't like, and what new features you'd like to see here in the future.

Science magazine reports that most federal science agencies and academic researchers who depend on federal grants may have to get by on flat funding levels through late next year:

"The Republican Congress adjourned last week without passing a 2007 budget for most federal agencies, choosing instead to extend a temporary spending measure until 15 February. And this week, the incoming Democratic leadership announced plans to apply current spending levels for the entire fiscal year, which ends 30 September, so that it can make a fresh start on the 2008 budget. Those decisions will put the squeeze on many research agencies and the scientists funded by them.

The yearlong resolution, if adopted once the new Congress convenes next month, would limit agency spending to the lowest of what either the House or Senate has already approved or what the agency received for the 2006 fiscal year."

Oceanographers use towed underwater vehicles to map seafloor bathymetry with sonar, take pictures of the seafloor and marine life, and record gravity and magnetics profiles of the oceanic crust. Apparently not satisfied with the science market, OceanFlite officially launched a leisure/yacht line of TUVs last month for entertainment purposes on private boats and yachts. OceanFlite, a UK-based company, designs and builds towed underwater vehicles (TUVs) that take design cues from marine life such as dolphins and manta rays. The Dolphin TUV (pictured right) can carry up to six cameras and a mini scanning sonar on a single dive to full ocean depths. What's particuarly unique about the Dolphin TUV is that it mimicks the body shape of dolphins to create negative lift and the outer hull permits water to flow inside the vehicle, which provides inertial stability. These technological advances have allowed OceanFlite to design one of the world's smallest high-capacity towed underwater vehicles. Other designs include the Manta TUV and SeaMaster TUV, both of which can reach full ocean water depths. The OceanFlite website has a cool gallery of pictures and a bulletin board where you can post questions about towed, remotely operated, and autonomous underwater vehicles.

Seed Magazine is celebrating its inaugural year of ScienceBlogs, which Element List first covered when it debuted in January 2006. In one of those old-media-capitalizing-on-new-media efforts (see also, Time's POTY 2006), Seed Magazine invited ScienceBloggers to appear in its dead tree publication in the December/January 2007 issue, which oddly enough doesn't feature any science bloggers on the cover. (Has anyone else ever noticed the lack of people pictures on Seed Magazine covers? Why hasn't it ever occured to them to put an actual scientist's face on the cover??)

Pardon us while we wipe our happy tears. The co-founders of InkyCircus, the cute, fun, science blog, which started about a year ago, have made their dream come true and started an online science mag called Inkling Magazine. Anne Casselman and Anna Gosline are named as co-editors, while the third InkyCircus writer, Katie Law, is named as a contributing writer with a day job. (Hmmm, steady paycheck versus start-up indie mag...go figure.) Inkling mag has an impressive array of articles and some prominent contributors, like Suzanne Franks, better known as Zuska from Thus Spake Zuska, the wonderfully bitchy feminista science blog. Current articles cover creative Photoshopping of Martian images, the science behind vampire myths, and radioactive beachcombing. Inkling covers the lighter side of science, which is not to say that it is light on the details. The mag blithely manages to mix up science and fun without dumbing down the science. We'll be keeping our eyes on the progress of Inkling in the months to come. No word yet on what will happen to InkyCircus.

In case you haven't already heard, Nature Publishing Group has been quietly working on a social networking site for scientists for the past year called Nature Network Beta for the Boston area. According to Nature Network editor, Corie Lok, Nature Network will soon go global and will also add a local London version. It seems that they're waffling between global versions a la MySpace and local versions a la Craigslist. There are clearly advantages to both and no reason that they can't create a hybrid with global and local functions just like Craigslist. They're also looking to add new cities. I'm sure New York can't be far behind, but other cities mentioned include Singapore, San Francisco, and Shanghai.

As of December 20, the Public Library of Science officially launched PLoS ONE, an online biomedical science journal with - hold on to your seats now - reader commenting capability.

• Blank Post [Pharyngula] - Possibly the most commented-upon science blog post that happens to be about nothing at all. By PZ Myers, of course.

  Choice comment by John: "I refuse to believe that this post was actually blank. There must be something there, I know it."

  PZ Myers offers a follow-up: "You may be wondering what that strange "Blank post" was all about. The science blogging crew has been having a discussion about the "Most active" box you can find in the right sidebar, and RPM challenged me that I could put up an empty post titled "Blank post" and it would get 10-20 comments. I proved him wrong—it got over 30 comments in less than an hour and a half. That's just wicked, people."

• Wikipedia-based Search Engine Coming Soon [TechCrunch] - Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has an exclusive screenshot (oooh, aren't we special!) of the new Wikiasari search engine due to launch next year. The basic idea is that it will produce useful search results rather than Google spam sites, which are better at search engine optimization than they are at creating relevant, useful content.
  
• New Blog by Female Triumvirate of Evolution Experts - "Hey, you! Science chica! Why don't you join up with the other femme fatales to complete the female triumvirate of evolution experts? We could change the world!" Nuff said.

It looks like Nature Publishing Group is doing a good job overall of embracing the web lately, particularly with its new free job posting service. Naturejobs.com announced its free "science recruitment" service in late November, mentioning twice in the same press release that Naturejobs currently receives 1.5 million page impressions and 200,000 unique visitors every month. (For comparison, Gawker.com, the Manhattan media and celebrity blog, receives 1.5 million page impressions per week.) I'm not sure how useful this new free service will be to employers or job seekers. As Craigslist has found, free job classified services result in a lot of junk job ads being posted, which clutters the space and makes it difficult for visitors to find good jobs. (Think about it, if the employer is too cheap to pay $50 or more for a job ad, how much are they going to pay you!) Craigslist job postings are free in most cities, but Craig Newmark and company found that charging a modest fee of $25 in NYC to $75 in San Francisco cut down on clutter and headaches and made the experience better for everyone. Naturejobs is taking the middle ground of offering both free job listings and paid listings that receive more prominent placement on the website. Of course, it doesn't hurt to try the free-for-all method. Naturejobs.com clearly is looking to grow its site traffic, so a flood of job postings, visitors, and ultimately advertisers, would be a nice problem to have.

The American Museum of Natural History's Science Bulletins website has some amazing Flash movies covering various earth science topics, including one pictured here on the steady decrease in Arctic sea ice volume since 1979. The Earth Viz movie is based on major news reports released by NASA in September, which showed rapid decreases in the volume of Arctic sea ice. The figure above shows that the summer sea ice extent in 2005 was 22% smaller than when satellite measurements began in 1979. Other Science Bulletins movies currently available cover the Yellowstone hotspot, a new black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, Bronx River restoration, and more.

The major news organizations are reporting that the Ayles Canadian ice shelf has broken free of Ellesmere Island in the Arctic, creating an island of floating ice that reaches up to 15 kilometers by five kilometers wide. Oil platforms, boats, and other aquatic inhabitants in the region are said to be threatened by the floating ice. But before you totally flip out, please note that the break happened over a year ago. From the CBC:

"The collapse of the Ayles shelf — one of six that still existed in Canada — occurred 16 months ago, on Aug. 13, 2005, but because it is so remote, no one saw it.

Scientists have been combining seismic and satellite data to determine what happened and are now releasing details of the collapse.

The researchers suspect climate change may have played a role in the collapse but said they cannot definitively say it is a result of global warming."

NASA has a nifty feature on its website that allows you to pick one of four digital postcards to send a message to the Expedition 14 crew on board the International Space Station. Type in a message, pick a stamp, and send it off.

With so many ways to rebel in the world, why waste your time piercing your nose when you could do something really revolutionary? You know, something useful.

Marie Tharp, who died this year, is remembered in this weekend's year-end issue of The New York Times Magazine. Marie is famous for creating the first physiographic map of the ocean floor using bathymetry data collected along ship traverses around the oceans. Her work helped lay the foundation for the theory of plate tectonics. The article is accompanied by an excellent video with multiple interview clips featuring Bill Ryan, a marine geologist, and Mike Purdy, Director, both of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where Marie worked as an assistant draftsperson and cartographer beginning in 1948. (The video is narrated, I think, by Roger Buck, also at Lamont.) One interesting fact from the article is that the ocean floor map was largely created in her own home after having been fired in the 1960s by Maurice Ewing, the first director of Lamont, mainly for her close association with Ewing's younger nemesis in the department, Bruce Heezen. Marie Tharp never earned a Ph.D. and never held a research scientist or professorship title. Nevertheless, given the huge impact of her maps of the oceans of the world, Marie Tharp is probably one of the most important female scientists that you've never heard of.