A couple weeks ago, Ed Yong published a talk by RadioLab’s Robert Krulwich that went viral in journalism and science-writing circles, for good reason. Speaking to graduating journalism students at UC Berkeley, Krulwich, who does some fine blogging of his own, expressed his pleasure and wonder at how blogs, twitter, and other newish tools allow […]
Continue reading →I just finished listening to Alok Jha’s podcast at Guardian about ScienceOnline. What a pleasure! Jha gracefully captures what drives science (and all) blogging, and what it offers readers — and writers — that they can’t get elsewhere. Jha and his producers also convey beautifully the spirit and intersection of interests that makes ScienceOnline so […]
Continue reading →I’ll be on three panels at ScienceOnline this weekend — one on ebooks, one on open science, and one on “Keeping the Bullshit Filter” (i.e., watchdogging science and science journalism). The ScienceOnline program describes all these (go there and search for the title). For those attending, considering following the streamed sessions, or curious about the […]
Continue reading →I resist best-of-year roundups when I see the heads — but then find I usually like reading them, and lo and behold, find it instructive to do my own. While most of my attention last year went into pitching and then beginning work on The Orchid and the Dandelion, I spent a lot of time […]
Continue reading →Are we squeezing everything we should out of the arsenic story? Some would say so. I’m not so sure. In a quick post-mortem yesterday on the Lake Mono bacterium, Brian Reid neatly ticks off how the “arsenic soap opera,” as he put it, “illustrates five trends in health and science communication that are likely to […]
Continue reading →In the Guardian’s weekly podcast today, I discuss the Wolfe-Simon Mono Lake bacteria paper with science editor Alok Jha and astrobiologist Zita Martins. Our post-mortem covers the hype before and after the press conference; the questions raised about the study’s methods and findings; NASA’s attempt to ignore (and get everyone else to ignore) those questions; […]
Continue reading →Where does consciousness come from? And when it ramps up or down, at what point does it move from consciousness to not-consciousness? Carl Zimmer published both a blog post and a story in the New York Times yesterday looking at the work of Guilioi Tononi, a University of Wisconsin neuroscientist who looks at these questions. […]
Continue reading →A week ago, evo biologist heavyweight E.O. Wilson and others published a paper in which they challenged the standard explanation for why animals do nice things for one another. Nice behavior is a big deal, so the paper raised a big flap. Let’s say you want to read just two things about this paper. Though my own […]
Continue reading →Before commenting I’ll make three disclosures up top: I have written and plan on continuing to write for the same magazine, though I think this does not seriously constrain me here; I’ve enjoyed many of Heffernan’s columns, but do not know her; I appreciate her nice nod to my blog and my writing on PepsiGate. … His website, well worth tracking, is http://blog.coturnix.org/ Meanwhile, if you want my own short list, see the particularly sharp commentaries or roundups on the meltdown that came from Martin Robbins , Paul Raeburn at Knight Science Journalism Tracker; the Guardian , and two “legacy media” heavyweights — Carl Zimmer , he of well-deserved NY Times fame, and former Scientific American editor John Rennie — neither of whom seem to share Hefferman’s casual reaction to ad-ed wall violations. ,
Continue reading →No fear: I’m confident he’ll be well-behaved, fascinating, and eloquent as always. He even scores in the comments , with a pointer to virus sex . [ Image: mating sand wasps , by Alex Wild , of the beautiful bug blog Myrmecos
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