With 20 days left of its Kickstarter campaign, the SCIENCE: Ruining Everything Since 1543 (an SMBC [Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal] Collection) has amassed $184, 562 for a project with a goal of $20,000.  Some of the more expensive incentives have been snapped but there are still lots of choices. From the campaign page,

SMBC (short for “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal”) is a daily-updated comic strip about all sorts of topics. Its author, Zach Weinersmith, is a giant dork who also has many other geeky projects such as producing SMBC Theater, writing for Snowflakes, his science blog the Weinerworks, and his science-themed podcast The Weekly Weinersmith (which he co-hosts with his wife, the parasitologist Kelly Weinersmith).

So it will come as no huge surprise that this, the third SMBC printed collection, is a compendium of his finest science-related strips.

Phil Plait in a Jan. 23, 2013 article for Slate.com describes the project and his involvement,

Today, Zach [Weiner] announced a new and exciting project: He’s collecting his science comics into a single compendium which he’s calling “Science: Ruining Everything Since 1543”. And it’s not just old comics; he’s also written some new ones for the book. He’s creating this book as a Kickstarter project. Give him money, and when it’s done he’ll send you the book.

And there’s more, too: He asked some well-known scientists on the web to send him a personal story about science in their lives, regaling how it’s affected them, and Zach will draw them up as a comic to put in the book. And guess who he asked? Well, the only one he told me about is me, but he assures me there are others. So I sent him an All-True Tale of Bad Astronomy Past, and he created a multi-panel comic about it.

Here’s a representative image of the artwork,

If you go to Phil Plait’s article , you can will find some panels from the collection or you can visit the Science: Ruining Everything campaign page to view a video presentation and learn more about the various incentives.

Meanwhile, the folks at the Nanowiki website have published their third book, Nanoparticles Before Nanotechnology. From the Nanowiki introduction page,

This year we chose the subject of Nanoparticles Before Nanotechnology simply because we were suspicious that nanoparticles are too often, in scientific and non-scientific circles, perceived as invented, while we think they should be understood as discovered.

Nanomaterials are claimed to be so new that people become scared. However, before nanotechnology, one can find nanoparticles in the works of both nature and Man, although they passed unnoticed by us until recently. The origin of nanoparticles in nature is basically i) biogenic, ii) geogenic (and also at the bio-inorganic interface), or iii) cosmogenic, while the nanoparticles produced by men come unintentionally from origins as burning wood and oil or unnoticed in crafted stuff such as cosmetics and colored glass and ceramics.

Additionally, to bring nano closer to society, following the same demystifying aims, we present a set of experiments, Hands On, in which some basics and useful nanoscale phenomena can be easily observed, such as preparing photonic crystals that look like opals, disinfecting water, or harvesting energy.

You can find many options (paper and various e-pub choices)  for getting the book if you follow the link provided previously or you can access the low res web version here as I did. Gorgeous images festoon the book and I wish they’d listed the sources or credits for them. They are truly stunning, even in low res. As for the text, I think they’ve provided a thoughtful compilation of information and organized it very well (I scanned the book quickly). I particularly appreciate having links so I can easily check out the sources for myself and I found a few things I didn’t know about, always a thrill.

In common with most emerging technology topics, knowledge about nanoparticles and other aspects of nanotechnology can change quickly as new data extends or contradicts what was previously believed. Within that context, this is one of the best resources I’ve seen and I’m thankful these folks took the time to pull this book together.