Lovers of science-in-culture subject matter may have been following the launch of the magazine Seed, which, if memory serves, first appeared in 2004. Its editorial stance was that ‘science is culture,’ i.e. that science is not an activity somehow separate from mainstream culture but should be covered by journalists the way any other area of modern life might be covered. At times, it may have looked and sounded like a scientific version of George, which covered politics as entertainment, and in the process sometimes forgot that while politics can be entertainment, it’s not just entertainment. These concerns aside, Seed has now been relaunched as part of the Seed Media Group, along with an excellent blog called Sciencegate. Both the redesign and the lively mixture of articles, photographs and reviews look quite promising so far. All of this is prelude to my pointing toward a short piece on the recent paper by Martin Lercher and colleagues that was published in NG on the evolution of metabolic networks in bacteria. The piece, by Maggie Wittlin, is on Seed's website, and Lercher provides some helpful commentary therein.