Since the responses to my recent inquiry were positive, I've rolled up my sleeves and gotten started.  Special thanks to badger for eir comment in that thread, as it inspired the framework used here.  

My intent in the upcoming posts is to offer a practical overview of biological topics of both broad-scale importance and particular interest to the Less Wrong community.  This will by no means be exhaustive (else I’d be writing a textbook instead, or more likely, you’d be reading one); instead I am going to attempt to sketch what amounts to a map of several parts of the discipline – where they stand in relation to other fields, where we are in the progress of their development, and their boundaries and frontiers.  I’d like this to be a continually improving project as well, so I would very much welcome input on content relevance and clarity for any and all posts. 

I will list relevant/useful references for more in-depth reading at the end of each post.  The majority of in-text links will be used to provide a quick explanation of terms that may not be familiar or phenomena that may not be obvious.  If the terms are familiar to you, you probably do not need to worry about those links.  A significant minority of in-text links may or may not be purely for amusement.

I’ve been a reader and occasional commenter here for a while now, but previously have not had a solid idea of what I could or wanted to contribute to the community in posting.  In light of recent comments stating an interest in more posts that offer concrete, factual information as well as remembering lukeprog’s call for such things in his Back to the Basics of Rationality post, I am considering a series of condensed posts about biology.  As someone who has spent my formal education on biologically-focused engineering (bioengineering BS, now studying bioinformatics under a chemical engineering department for my PhD) but has always had the bulk of my friends in electrical engineering, computer science, and more traditional chemical engineering, I’ve gotten used to offering such condensed explanations whenever biology works its way into a discussion.  From what I’ve seen on LW thus far, the community educational base leans more in those (non-biology) directions, so I believe this is a niche that could use filling. 

Since biology is a rather broad subject, and you could all go read Wikipedia or a textbook if you wanted a very detailed survey course, my intent is to pick targeted topics that are relevant to current events and scientific developments.  Each post would focus on one such event/Awesome New Study, discussing the biological background and potential implications, including either short explanations or links to the basics needed to understand the subject.  If there are any political ties to the subject, I will withhold my explicit opinions on those aspects unless asked in the comments. 

My questions, then, are the following:

• Is this something that people here would find interesting/useful in the general sense?  (While I do enjoy talking to myself, doing so on this topic has gotten a bit old, so I really do want to know if no one really thinks this will be helpful.)
• How long/in-depth would you like?  This question is intended to gauge what my background explanation: background links ratio should be.
• And most importantly, what are some topics you would like to see discussed?

UPDATE: Having followed the comments so far and done some preliminary outlining, I'm leaning toward a more organized progression of topics that will still tie into current interests and developments, but not be centered on them.  A bit more thought and putting ideas to text indicated that I could group the interest areas into biological categories (molecular, populations, developmental, neuro, etc) fairly easily, which would then allow for a 'foundations' post to introduce each major category, followed by posts that go over What We Know Now, Why We Care, and Where It's Going.