One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading , posted at the start of every month. Fiction Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

Field notes of early-20th century entomologist Johanna Bonne-Wepster have been turned into crucial new public health data through digitization, filling data gaps and continuing her legacy in forming Dutch tropical medicine research. Natural history collections contain huge amounts of information on diversity, distribution and ecology of a variety of species; however, much of this valuable information is effectively lost

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading , posted at the start of every month.

This week in GigaScience , Hasindu Gamaarachchi and colleagues published a paper on their HARU solution for selective sequencing, to be used alongside the handheld (“tricorder” like) Nanopore MinION device . With the MinION, it is possible to kick out all non-target DNA strands before they are processed through the device’s pores, thus selectively sequencing specific target regions of the genome.

I've been writing and thinking about design in biology since I started Quintessence of Dust . I want to write and think about it a lot more, so in my last post I introduced my view of the concept and pointed ahead to this post, which consists of edited excerpts from some conversations at a discussion forum at the Peaceful Science site. You will find links to those conversations in the previous post.

One of the most interesting books I've read in the last few years was The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution by J. Arvid Ågren. The author explains the gene's-eye view both scientifically and historically, and I hope to write about the book sometime soon. But for now there's one point he makes that I found fascinating.

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading , posted at the start of every month. Fiction Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin Recommended by colleagues on our PLOS Slack channel and in a great review at NPR.

On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption was followed by a joint statement of support by the largest and most influential research organizations in Europe.

I've reviewed a few books over the years here at Quintessence of Dust , but From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris was the first book I blogged through that I was genuinely excited about reading.

Full series on From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris.