Nature Network’s bloggers have been making good use of the new software we launched last week. The quality and quantity of new posts has been a joy to behold. So brace yourself for a long but excellent reading list.

Eva Amsen got things moving with a light-hearted look at continental plates. What constitutes a continent? And why do the people of Britain often claim to not be on one?

It’s a nice mix of science and politics, but in the end, yes, the UK is really part of the EU, and really part of Europe. “The continent” is just a phrase to refer to the non-island part of Europe, where they eat “continental” breakfasts. But both geologically and politically, the UK is on a continent, and it’s Europe.

Of course, continental plates have been at the front of many people’s minds for more tragic reasons of late. Two bloggers reported on the devastation wrought by the recent earthquake. Miguel Allende documents a side of the quake that hasn’t been so widely reported: the disruption caused to working life. Specifically, he describes the damage caused to his laboratory and how this will set back research in the area. Meanwhile, in perhaps the most moving piece of writing to appear on Nature Network, Maria José Navarrete-Talloni shares her hurt and frustration as a Chilean scientist working so far away from the scene of the tragedy.

After seeing a poster advertising jobs in the secret service, Jennifer Rohn asks Would a scientist make a good spy?.

I briefly toyed with the idea of a career change. The poster invited me to remember what the last person who’d left the carriage looked like: true, I’d idly watched passengers straggle off at Westminster, but couldn’t for the life of me recall a single face or outfit a mere thirty seconds later. And this is a person who spent literally months looking at millions of cells with the sole purpose of distinguishing differences. Best not to give up the day job, I thought, even though the point was probably moot: they don’t even trust we non-Euro resident aliens to vote in local elections or become civil servants, let alone don a black balaclava and abseil down some enemy building under a new moon or slip truth serum into a high-ranking foreign diplomat’s martini.

This week’s other exceptional posts include Ayusman Sen on the philosophy of science, Sara Fletcher reflects (diffracts?) on the history of X-ray crystallography, Andrew Sun laments the lack of homegrown scientific equipment in China, Matt Brown maps some scientific tourist hotspots in London, and Viktor Poór returns from a short break with his latest stripped science cartoon (shown to the right).

And finally…

The Cambridge Science Festival started this week and some Nature Networkers are busy both running and attending events. For more details on who is doing what, check out the Cambridge forum.