Alas, poor Chem Blog! We knew it, readers: a blog of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.

In a post entitled 'The final step in evolution is extinction' (http://go.nature.com/TFm593), Kyle Finchsigmate announced that he has stopped blogging. In his own words “I think I have pushed it far enough and I have reached the end of my intellectual interest and now wish to divest myself from blogging”. Its passing did not go unnoticed and Mitch recorded the event on The Chemistry Blog (http://go.nature.com/Gj85Nx). He paid “homage to the great Kyle Finchsigmate's influential chemical blog...he was able to get away with his potty-mouth antics in a way to be informative, cutting, and always entertaining”. Beyond the antics, Mitch reminds us that it “served as a vehicle to develop his capacity to analyze literature and communicate his insights to the chemical community”.

On a more serious note, a post by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee on the ScienceInsider blog (http://go.nature.com/bdQAKi) discussed a recent report challenging the received wisdom that the USA needs more science, technology, engineering or math(s) (STEM) graduates. In a nutshell, the paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management suggests that “US colleges and universities produce three times more STEM graduates every year than the number of STEM jobs available”. This oversupply depresses wages and leads to high-performing students turning away from science. Comments were pretty forthright, with many people bemoaning the low levels of both jobs and remuneration in STEM.

What do you do when your trusty calculator breaks down? The answer, according to Chiral Jones (http://go.nature.com/TxCTWt), is to use Google. “In addition [to the answer], it'll also spit out whatever it interprets as its actual search.” And in many cases, that turns out to geographical coordinates – any more hits in Senegal and Jones will be taking it as a sign to enter the Dakar Rally!