Sarah Kendrew selects interesting and notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the physical sciences, chemistry, engineering, computer science, geosciences and mathematics. She blogs about astronomy at One Small Step.

[Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging News]

The longest day of the year is round the corner, and summer is officially over in Western Europe. These physical sciences selection are brought to you from winter-coat-weather Germany.

Is cultural creative transmission governed by chaotic processes? This rather weighty question is the subject of an unusual but blog post on A Replicated Typo, in which author Sean Roberts talks about chaotic sampling of birdsong and other creative processes.

Mosquitoes may be the arch-enemy of a good night’s sleep, but for much of the world, avoiding their bites is a matter of life and death. Paige Brown discusses exciting new work that shows promising results in warding off these and potentially other bothersome critters by confusing their sensory systems, so they can’t locate their next meals.

Location based services are all the rage in social networking, and geotagging of images is a prime example. On Sciencetext, David Bradley looks at recent research into the usability of several image geotagging systems, used by popular services like Flickr and Panoramio.

Finally, I was happy to see several bloggers from the ResearchBlogging community on the list of Winners of the 3 Quarks Daily science blogging prizes, announced today. Congratulations SciCurious, Anne Jefferson, Sean Carroll and Ethan Siegel! I’ll be back next week with more picks.