The online edition of Seed magazine has a great series of science cribsheets covering various headline-grabbing scientific phenomena, such as string theory, extinction, hurricanes, climate change, and more. They're downloadable as low-resolution GIFs or high-resolution PDF files for printing. They make for great mini science lessons and are handy for brushing up on important science topics just enough so that you can more intelligently follow the news or sound smart at your next cocktail party. This month's cribsheet covers photosynthesis, the process in plants, algae and some bacteria that uses the energy in sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates and oxygen.

Bora Zivkovic, also known as Coturnix from A Blog Around The Clock, began his first day as the Online Community Manager yesterday at the online science journal PLoS ONE in San Francisco. Bora was invited to interview for the position after PLoS ONE Managing Editor Chris Surridge read Bora's blog post appropriately titled I Want This Job! We asked Bora to send the above picture of him in his new office in San Francisco (Darwin t-shirt optional). Luckily, PLoS ONE didn't require Bora to shut down his blog, so Bora is calling on his posse of readers and fellow bloggers to help him out in his mission to build an active community of commenters on the scientific papers at PLoS ONE. The trick, of course, is finding not just any commenter, but a number of commenters who can actually understand or are willing to slog through the highly specialized scientific papers in the first place. Bora's got a tough task ahead of him, so take a look at PLoS ONE and give him a hand.

Chris Mooney's party for his new book Storm World at People Lounge last night in Manhattan's Lower East Side was a great success. Mucho thanks to Seed Magazine for sponsoring the party with yummy food and even free copies of Chris' new book. Chris' brother Davy Mooney (pictured above) provided the musical entertainment. We saw lots of Seed Magazine folks, of course, including Seed Founder and Editor-in-Chief Adam Bly, who arrived fashionably late. Some top NYC-based science bloggers at the event included Gavin Schmidt from Real Climate, Grrlscientist from Living the Scientific Life, and Jake Young from Pure Pedantry. Chris is kicking off his nationwide book tour at Barnes and Noble in NYC tonight. You can find the schedule for his book tour on his blog here. More photos from the event after the jump.

Discover Magazine has announced the winners of the String Theory in Two Minutes or Less video contest. Woot! Columbia University Physicist Prof. Brian Greene selected String Ducky, above, as the winner. The majority of viewers, however, took their frustrations out on their high school math teachers by selecting the The Problem with Math. We're going with Brian Greene on this one. Duckies are cute! To see all of the videos, click here.

It's been a while since we last posted about Heidi Cullen's progress at The Weather Channel. (Yes, we know, it's been a while since we posted anything.) Regardless, we couldn't miss mentioning our famous Lamont-Doherty alumnus' interview with Claudia Dreifus for the New York Times. According to the article, Heidi (a.k.a., Dr. Cullen) is the only Ph.D. climatologist in the country with her own weekly television show. She also knows where to find the best punchy leads:

I’ve become a media junkie. I read far more widely now than when I was a researcher. Also, I watch a lot of TV, which means all the news programs, “Frontline,” even ESPN, which I watch to learn how to write punchy leads. I also listen to NPR, check out Greenwire and troll the scientific journals like Science, Nature and Geophysical Research Letters.

Perhaps the highlight of the article covers Heidi's infamous blog post last year that got conservative commentators' panties in a wad: