Fizzy drinks and computers famously don't mix, which is why I no longer drink Coke during BBC Question Time. But it turns out that they don't work too well in blogs either, as Seed Magazine are finding out to their cost.

The story, in a nutshell, is that Seed - the company behind ScienceBlogs - and Pepsi - the company behind obesity and tooth decay - have entered a partnership in which Pepsi will pay to have their own ScienceBlogs blog. This is obviously a break away from the usual model in which bloggers apply to the site, are accepted on merit, and receive some pocket money from advertising.

This is the first in an occasional series of posts based on the premise that people send me things for free, and I then review them. If you'd also like to send me anything for free, please get in touch.

Today's subject is a book called The Sun Kings, by Stuart Clark. It also has a subtitle, "The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began." The subtitle is, I think you will agree with me, pretty crap, and the front cover is a dire mixture of red and greenish yellow that would look nice on the dinner plate at my local Indian Restaurant, but doesn't make the cover particularly attractive or easy to read.

Sadly, I expect most people's reaction in a bookstore these days would be "Who the **** is Richard Carrington?"

Over the last week, a miniature storm has been brewing on the intertubes, and it concerns a subject which everyone is sick of talking about, but which everyone feels compelled to talk about anyway: no, not house prices, but the state of science journalism.

Specifically this is a response to Jeremy Laurance, a man who does not like criticism, and so will probably not like this post, should he ever develop enough of an understanding of the internet to find it and read it.

So last week I was given a bit of a roasting by guest blogger Sarah over a remark I made on Twitter, where I said that I couldn't see why academic data should be covered by the Freedom of Information Act. Unfortunately, Twitter is not a good place to put things in context, so here's a post clarifying my views.

All this week, I'll be running a series of six articles and a podcast at The Guardian examining the science policies of the various parties contesting the imminent General Election. We've put a series of questions to eight of the parties, and we'll be reviewing their answers as well as posting them in full on our special microsite:

The Litmus Test: Science policy at the general election

Last year, Frank Swain of SciencePunk and I put a series of questions to various parties ahead of the European Election in an article that ended up creating a lot of debate, particularly in and around the Green Party.

Earlier this week I put up a piece on science vs. journalism, in which I took Fiona Fox to task for failing to understand that blogging is a medium, not a style of writing, and that journalism is a style of writing, not a medium. Since then, Ed Yong, Quackometer and Jack of Kent have pitched in with their versions. One of those three are right, the other two are, I think, flawed.

Ed's take on this is brilliant (and hilarious), and he really seems to get it.

Welcome to the 22nd edition of The Giant's Shoulders, a carnival all about scientific research from days gone by, when you couldn't just look it up on Wikipedia and you had to scratch a wet stick across a bit of dead tree to get your point across and Pluto was still a planet. Ah, the good old days.

Anyway, on with the submissions!

• JUST A MON explores how astronomy has been used to date historical events, and how the results may not always be as accurate as we might wish.

Moments ago, it was announced via Simon Singh's lawyers that... well, here's what they said:

The BCA today served a Notice of Discontinuance bringing to an end its ill-fated libel claim against Dr Simon Singh arising out of criticisms he made of its promotion of treatments for childhood ailments.

Dr Singh's predicament as the sole defendant in an action brought in respect of a comment piece in the Guardian newspaper (to which the BCA never directed any complaint) was seen as a rallying point for those concerned about the abuse of UK libel laws in connection with scientific debate.

In a fit of apparently unintentional irony, Fiona Fox of the Royal Institution's Science Media Centre, has posted a blog on the BBC's journalism blog about how blogging isn't journalism.

I'll get to that in a second, but Richard Littlejohn has also criticized blogs recently, and I can't resist sharing his views with you. Littlejohn is a man with many intelligent and nuanced points to make about new media, as evidenced in his latest column, published on the internet: