Name a new species of jellyfish! The Bonaire Box Jellyfish’s genus name is Tamoya, but it doesn’t have a species name yet. Dust off your Latin, check out the contest guidelines in Year of Science 2009, and submit your entry by June 14.

• Science Magazine is offering a prize for the best online education resource. The prize will “recognize outstanding projects from all regions of the world that bring freely available online resources to bear on science education.”  Nominate your favorite project by June 30.

• Read the latest editions of Carnival of Evolution and Circus of the Spineless, chock filled with delicious sciencey goodness. And tonight’s your last chance to submit to the Very Special World Ocean Day edition of Carnival of the Blue!

• Crawling zombie jello mold, for those special dinner parties. I think it would pair well with the classic Thorax Cake. (Via Boing Boing)

• Jezebel’s Abridged History of the Human Embryo is fascinating. Did you know that the classic anti-choice fetus photo was staged with a dead fetus? And that abortion was common and accepted pre-Enlightenment?

• Bora explores the potential biology behind the Great Cilantro Divide – the chasm between people who love it and people who think it tastes like nasty soap. Also check out NPR’s take on cilantro haters – they might be missing the ability to detect the yummy fresh taste.

• Southern Fried Scientist has a great post on the evolution of snake and platypus venom. (Yes, platypus are venomous!) Why are the toxins so similar when the animals are so distant?

• Compare 2009 Manhattan to 1609 Mannahatta. It’s easy to forget that NYC was surrounded by spectacular oyster beds and salmon runs, and had better soil and a far milder climate than Boston. The Indians and the Dutch knew what they were doing.

• Cephalopod Tea Party is giving away cephalopod-swag! To enter their raffle, just tell them about your favorite cephalopod, mention them in your blog, or draw them a cephalopod picture. Yes, this is my entry into their contest – I want the cute lil octonecklace!

• Mark Bittman, the author of the indispensable cookbook How to Cook Everything, published a recipe for red snapper in his New York Times column. Grist Magazine pointed out that red snapper are dreadfully overfished. Monterey Bay Aquarium’s blog Sea Notes reports on the ensuing conservation controversy:

Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the mea culpa did not come forth. Instead Bittman replied that Seafood Watch is published by scientists, and not cooks. Well, no one wants to dispute that. Especially not us! Our Seafood Watch program’s credibility and authority comes from the fact that a team of in-house scientists independently assesses each species to arrive at a recommendation based entirely on science!

• Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn may be declared a Superfund site. I used to live in the neighborhood formerly known as Gowanus Flats (since renamed Boerum Hill by developers) and I have a great fondness for the scrappy life – tunicates! mussels! fish! – hanging on in the canal’s oily waters. It has the potential be a great urban marine ecosystem and I hope it gets cleaned up.

• What a dead pixel in Google Earth would look like on the ground.

• Xtranormal lets you make your own 3D animated movies based just off text. Check out playwright/screenwriter Greg Machlin’s example. (Via Greg’s blog Insert Title Here)

• Woody Harrelson defends assault on cameraman by claiming that he thought the guy was a zombie. This happens to me all the time.
  

  “I wrapped a movie called ‘Zombieland,’ in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character,” Harrelson said in a statement issued Friday by his publicist.

• Oceans 4 Ever has a great interview with famed underwater photographer Tony Wu.

• Reconciliation Ecology wonders how physicist Freeman Dyson became a global warming denialist.

• The Intersection compiles a comprehensive list of policy fellowships for scientists and engineers.

• Bora lets it all hang out with tons of Friday Weird Sex Blogging.

• Bioephemera reviews Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Must get NOW!

• And the Thundercats live-action movie trailer! As Martini-Corona says, “It’s fake, but it’s basically all that I’ve ever wanted in an internets.” (Via Sam).

• Rolling Stone honored 100 People Who Are Changing America, including many scientists. I was particularly taken by #43 – a female theoretical physicist who hypothesizes that  “gravity may be concentrated in a hidden dimension beyond our normal three — in a warped, parallel universe with totally different chemistry.” (Via Chaos Theory.)

• Rick MacPherson posts about the challenges of bringing real science into the classroom. It all started with an innocuous statistic about oxygen production and ends with ocean educators throwing DOWN. A must-read for people in science outreach.

• WaterNotes reminds us that feeding wild animals is always, always bad. People who poison baby dolphins, however accidentally, are going to the special hell.

• Anne Karsten creates stuffed monsters from 4th and 5th graders’ drawings. The Stuffed Monster Gallery has both the original drawings and the final product. They are adorable – this is clearly the Best Idea Ever. She’s posted DIY instructions and also takes commissions. (Via Boing Boing.)

• Whet your appetite for Podcast of the Blue #1 with Podcast of the Blue #0, featuring Jason, Mark, and Rick. I promise that #1 (hopefully ready by Tuesday) will contain quasi-intentional double entendres and some very exciting Oyster’s Garter news!

• The Japanese robotic sea bream has a pollution-sniffing robo-fish buddy. Now they can party with the robo-lobsters and robo-lampreys. At least, until the Cylons come and all of this happens again.

• What makes a scientist? Dr. Isis has a great two-part series on some icky sexism and academic-ism. Click those links lots and lots since she’s also funding an undergrad research award with her SciBorg income.

• Please enjoy this dance number from Indian Superman. Superman! Superman! Bidi bum bum! (Via Boing Boing.)

Yes, talking about blue whales and the Watchmen in the same post WAS deliberate. No, I do not have dignity or self-restraint.

• Kingdom of the Blue Whale premiers tonight on the National Geographic channel (sadly, not one included in the cheapass Castle Wolffenstein cable).  Get excited by reading early reviews from Biochemicalsoul, Observation of a Nerd and Oh, for the Love of Science!

• Speaking of whales, is conservation NGO Sea Shepherd actually helping them by criminal ramming of ships in the Antarctic? (You can tell how I feel about that.) What about sharks? Dr. M at Deep Sea News discusses the ship-ramming incident  (though the discussion ends in foul sockpuppetery) and WhySharksMatter at Southern Fried Scientist tackles the sharks, with possible cameo by Paul Watson. Also see Shark Divers’s excellent series.

• I haven’t made it to the Watchmen movie yet, but that hasn’t stopped me from mocking it. Two quality parodies (via Martini-Corona):

1. Saturday Morning Watchmen – “Strong together, united forever, they’re the best of friends!”
2. What if Woody Allen (or Sofia Coppola or Quentin Tarentino) had directed Watchmen? Slideshow from Slate.

• Via Climate Shifts, “Five places to go before global warming messes them up.”

• The Southern Fried Scientist considers the evil of PhDs in pop culture. He didn’t go to evil graduate school for nothing!

• Amazing animated musical “Sita Sings The Blues” is free from copyright purgatory and available in full online.

• And from bioephemera, this ad from San Francisco clothing company Cordarounds. Please, oh please, read the labels on the Soft-O-Meter.

• Parts of the Arctic Sea newly exposed by melting ice were closed to fishing. It’s a tiny drop of yay in a big bucket of global warming environmental sadness.

• Echinoblog invokes the asteroid corollary of Godwin’s Law with the only supervillain ever to matter: STARFISH HITLER. And there is video, oh yes.

• The very first Diversity in Science Carnival will be hosted by honorary ocean blogger DN Lee over at Urban Science Adventures! Since it’s Black History Month, this carnival’s theme is black innovators. Let’s show everyone that you don’t have to be a crazy old white guy to be a scientist! Send your entry to DN by February 20th.

And here’s a video of the Wunder Bonder. Don’t worry, this blog is still more-or-less PG-13 and the video is safe for work. Unless your work really hates mullets. (Via Martini-Corona and Wil Wheaton.)

Artist's rendition of the ocean bloggers at the Friday night shanty sing.

• Bora has photos from last week’s shanty sing at the Science Online conference. There were only four of us (+ DN’s afro!) due to plane snafus, but we were quite vigorous – after a couple songs, the bar emptied out nicely. Eva judiciously gave us one thumb up for hats and one thumb down for tunefulness.

• Bora also pointed me to a quality new blog, FYI: Science! It’s by a science teacher, and s/he has hilarious entries on fainting goats (watch the video NOW), maggots, and carnivorous plants.

• Science writers Carl Zimmer (Parasite Rex, Microcosm) and Chris Mooney (Storm World, The Republican War on Science) debate the fuuuuture offff sciiiiience!

• For any DC readers out there, Chris Mah of Echinoblog is going to be Featured Scientist in the National Museum of Natural History this Wednesday! Go talk to him about awesome echinoderms, awesome geekery, or combine the two and ask him about echinoderm influences on Doctor Who.

Thanks to Obi-Wan Morava for the quality crab purse photo!