As the end of the year approaches, we’ll reflect on some of the highlights from Nature Network in 2010. In the first of a series, we look back on some of the posts from our newer bloggers, beginning with Barbara Ferreiera, Jim Caryl and Tom Webb.

Astrophysicist Barbara Ferreira is one of Nature Network’s more recent bloggers, first laying out her table in late September with a surprising main course:

This blog’s inspiration is a Portuguese expression: “desbloqueador de conversa” (literally, conversation unblocker). Something you say at a dinner party when silence kicks in or when some of the people at the table are having a heated argument and ruining the atmosphere. A snappy way of changing the topic of conversation: “Did you know that the penis of the blue whale can be 8 feet long?”.

She’s since raised plenty of questions that are less likely to put you off your frankfurters:

Can orange juice help cure a cold?

Why otherwise-vegetarian Aussies are eating kangaroo meat

Is the coastline of Britain infinite?

The curious life, nose and moose of Tycho Brahe

And many other delicious nuggets.

Jim’s a postdoctoral molecular geneticist (with a staphylococcal twist) at the University of Leeds, England. His particular field of interest is ‘bacterial fitness’, a subject he’s exploring through what he terms a ‘gene gym’:

I will be making a variety of gyms and assault courses for some rather unfortunate and flabby opportunistic pathogens, so I can better understand which assault courses result in the bugs bending double and sucking for air before dying out, and which result in the bugs overcoming their initial stitch and come out the other side laughing. I will in due course be moving on to the staphylococcal equivalent of Royal Marines, to determine what gym tricks they used to become such hard-asses.

Along the way, he’s written many thoughtful words about antibacterial resistance, dearth of antibacterial research, lack of proper sequencing data for plasmids, and other related topics.

Tom joined Nature Network back in May, armed to the teeth with stories about the life aquatic. Tom is a marine ecologist, despite working from the distinctly landlocked University of Sheffield, UK. His opening, fish-facting words explain the title of his blog, Mola mola

The ocean sunfish – of which Mola mola is the scientific name – is a curious beast. It looks like a child’s drawing of a fish, probably less realistic than any other fish. But, it does indeed exist, basking in the warm surface waters of all the major oceans of the world. It is both the largest and most fecund bony fish, one 3.1m giant weighing in at 2235kg, and a (considerably smaller) female found to contain an unbelievable 300 million eggs.

Here’s one:

His octopuses’ garden of a blog features posts on biodiversity, marine biology, human impacts on ecosystems, science-policy, and the politics of science. Early highlights include posts on the privacy of lab emails, privatising peer review, why marine ecology is damned hard to study, and the role of chance in career progression. And there are plenty more treasures laying in the depths and shallows of Tom’s blog.