Today we introduce you to Sedeer el-Showk (Inspiring Science, Twitter)

Sedeer el-Showk has been blogging about science for only a year and a half now but has rapidly garnered a good audience for his blog, Inspiring Science. In addition, Sedeer recently joined Nature Education’s Scitable blogs where he blogs about evolution [full disclosure: I am the Community Manager of Scitable blogs]. When not blogging, Sedeer focuses on trying to wrap up his PhD in plant biology at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

I asked Sedeer a few questions about his writing life, why he writes about science and how he juggles with writing and his PhD.

Photo by Hannele Luhtasela-El Showk

Hello and welcome to The SA Incubator. To start off, why did you get started writing about science?

Thanks for interviewing me; I appreciate the opportunity!  In retrospect, it’s not surprising that I’ve ended up writing about science—the odd part is that it took me so long to get here!  I’ve always been good at languages and enjoyed playing with words.  I also love reading, and part of me has wanted to be a writer ever since I spent an afternoon when I was about eight years old tinkering on a typewriter that belonged to a family friend.  (I still love typewriters, by the way, especially old ones.  A Smith-Premier #10 from 1911 currently has pride of place in our living room.)

I first realized how much I liked science writing when I had to write a popular science article for a course during my M.Sc.  I really enjoyed the process and was thrilled that a translation of the article was published in Luonnon Tutkija, a Finnish nature magazine.  Later, when I started thinking about moving out of research after my PhD and wondering about what to do next, I remembered how much fun I had had writing that article, which rekindled my almost-forgotten desire to be a writer.  I decided to start a blog about science to see if I was any good and if I would stick to it; my very first post was the article I had written for the course, On the Brink of Extinction.  I stuck to it, I improved, and here I am!

Your science blog is aimed at non-scientists. Why do you think it’s important to communicate science to non-scientists?

One obvious reason is that citizens facing debates about genetically modified organisms, climate change, DNA databases, etc, need to be properly informed about these issues, both to help them reach a decision and to help them evaluate new information.  Yes, it’s been said countless times, but it’s still true.

If you’d asked me that question when I started blogging, I might not have had much more to say than that.  Over the past year and half of blogging, though, I’ve been giving the matter some thought and I realized there are several other important reasons.  Many people think that science is impenetrably difficult and they just “can’t do it”, which is something I think science writing can and should change.  Good science writing should do more than just explain a piece of research or a scientific idea; it should also leave the reader with greater confidence thanks to their new understanding.  At its best, science writing should empower readers and expand their world by making them realize that understanding and appreciating science isn’t outside their reach.

I also think science provides a unique opportunity to challenge prevailing myths about our societies, our selves, and our place in the world.  I’ve already written a post discussing how science communication helps us understand ourselves better, so I won’t repeat what I said there.

I guess that the most important reason to me, personally, is the fact that we all start out as “non-scientists”.  I was lucky enough to be raised in an atmosphere of critical thought and scientific inquiry, so I feel a sense of obligation to pass that along.  I hope my writing will encourage people to be more curious about the world around them and to seek out answers, whether that’s by reading books or carrying out experiments.

Many people think of science as being hard or boring. How do you think science bloggers, like yourself, can bring science to those people?

Photo by Hannele Luhtasela-El Showk

It’s quite a challenge, and one I’m not always confident I’m able to meet.  There are some basic things you can do, like writing clearly and engagingly about science and showing how a piece of research is relevant or inspiring.  It can be hard to do that consistently, but I enjoy the process enough that I keep at it, trying to maintain a standard and always aiming high.  I think I’ve had some measure of success, but I’m painfully aware that there’s a certain demographic that’s just not interested at all in reading about this sort of thing.

Regardless of how carefully I craft my posts, I know that there are people who simply have no more inclination to hear about science than I do to follow music, fashion, or celebrity gossip.  I’d love to be able to reach those people, but I haven’t yet figured out how to do it.  I think the trick is to somehow slip in the science communication incidentally, without making it explicit.  Science writing with a strong narrative structure is one way of doing that.  Another approach that I find intriguing is video games based around a scientific concept which can give players an intuition for that concept.

I’ve also made an effort to communicate science in other ways than blogging.  Over the past few years, I’ve given several talks at a local bookstore.  They’re usually based on a post I’ve written or am working on, but it’s a good way to reach people who don’t tend to read blogs; the discussions afterwards have also been excellent.  I think it’s great to engage in outreach activities beyond just writing about science if you have the time and ability.  For several years now, I’ve wanted to arrange a program to link up post-docs or other researchers with high-school science classes, where they could give presentations every so often.  The researchers would get valuable experience in dealing with non-scientists, while the classes would get to meet a researcher and the teachers would get access to someone they could reach out to on science issues.  I think programs like that can benefit everyone; I hope I’ll have the time to organize it someday.

Indeed, communicating science to scientist and non-scientist audiences is vastly different. How did you cope with writing for non-scientists especially since you were predominantly communicating science to peers in your academic career?

Yes, academic writing and popular science writing are dramatically different styles.  Sometimes I switch from reading/writing one to the other during the middle of the day and it’s always a jarring transition.

It took a bit of effort for me to learn to write for non-scientists; looking back at some of my earlier posts, I feel like I’ve made quite a bit of progress, though I know it’s an ongoing process and I hope I’ll continue to improve.  Getting feedback on my writing helped quite a lot; putting aside my ego and actually listening to the feedback helped even more.  I asked people I trusted what they thought of my posts: what worked for them, what they found confusing, where they got bored.  Then I tried to keep that feedback in mind when I wrote the next post—in fact, sometimes I tried to imagine that I was writing for a specific person.  As I was writing, I would ask myself how I would explain the concept to my non-scientist friends over a cup of tea and used that as a guide in composing the text.

Another thing that’s been really useful was reading: reading other science writers’ work, reading about science writing, reading books and blog posts and articles about writing in general.  The point isn’t to copy someone else’s style; it’s to think about what they’re doing and why it works (or doesn’t).  Writing is a craft that I thoroughly enjoy practising and hope to continue developing, so I haven’t had any trouble finding the motivation to learn more about it.  I’ve read books about everything from rhetoric to writing sci-fi & fantasy, and I’ve usually learned something useful along the way.  Books like A Field Guide for Science Writers helped me think about different techniques and approaches to use, while The Best Science Writing Online 2012 showed me how much I could improve.  It also gave me a goal to aim for—I want to make it into that series!

Has your blogging helped you in your PhD? If so, how?

To be honest, I’m not sure that it really has helped much.  That’s partly because I’m not planning to pursue a research career after my PhD, so I’ve been focusing more on developing my writing and getting to know people in that community.  I also haven’t written very much about research in my field, for some reason.  I think it might be because deep down I’m actually an evolutionary biologist rather than a plant biologist.

Having said that, the consistent writing practice involved in blogging regularly has certainly had an impact on my PhD.  I’ve always enjoyed writing, but now I find it far easier to prepare summaries, and I’ve become better at composing my comments logically and clearly when providing feedback about a paper.

A recent blog post in the Guardian, argued that in addition to “infotainment” articles, there is a need for more critical science journalism. What are your views on this?

I think the choice of the word “infotainment” might explain some of the stronger responses to this post.  To me, infotainment has a somewhat negative connotation.  It’s entertainment disguised as information; it’s not as good as serious, informative discourse.  These sorts of associations are likely to put people on a defensive footing, though the provocation may have been a good way to start a discussion.

Semantics aside, I wasn’t convinced by the overall argument put forward in the post.  Yes, “critical science journalism” is important.  There’s certainly a place for it and perhaps there isn’t enough of it…but I don’t think so.  It’s important to point out the shortcomings of a piece of research and to avoid describing everything as an “amazing breakthrough”, but I think many people would be turned off by science writing that consistently took research to task, picking out flaws and pointing out caveats.  Science communicators are competing for people’s attention in an increasingly crowded information scene.  Yes, we should avoid sensationalism and over-hyping results.  Yes, we should be critical.  But it’s also important to be appealing and engaging—in a word, entertaining—in order to draw readers in.

To my mind, the dichotomy between critical and entertaining science writing is something of a false one.  Certainly, the two extremes are quite different, but I don’t see why there can’t be a happy middle ground.  I think it’s possible to write entertainingly about science while retaining a certain critical view; many science writers do it successfully and I strive to as well.  Writers should always try to convey the nuances behind a story and never assume the audience is stupid.  Avoid jargon, but don’t talk down to your readers.  Of course, such writing won’t be as thoroughly critical as what was described in the Guardian post, but, as I said above, I’m not sure that’s what we should be aiming for.  I think that kind of writing might have a relatively limited audience and be better suited to a more dedicated venue.

Another approach, which I wholeheartedly advocate, is to avoid presenting scientific research in a simplistic, prefabricated way and instead to write in a manner that reflects the actual process of science.  I tried to do something like that in my story about our ignorance regarding how birds navigate.  Instead of trying to frame the research as a “breakthrough”, I wrote about what I thought it really represented: an admission that the scientific consensus had been wrong, and how this was a step forward since it made us aware of our ignorance.  It was a great opportunity to discuss the scientific process, which is very important in science communication.  I think building a basic awareness of how science works and arming non-scientists to approach reports critically (whether about science or other topics) is much more valuable and effective than using science writing to relentlessly criticize research results and techniques.

Which story of yours do you like best?

Photo by Hannele Luhtasela-El Showk

Wow, that’s a tough one!  Writing on Inspiring Science has been a learning experience, so I guess there are some stories which I wish I’d told better—older posts where I really like the content and the message, but now realize the delivery could have be improved.  But there are also a few posts which I’m quite proud of, so it’s hard to pick.  If I had to pick just one, it would probably be my post about the “anternet”: How does an ant colony coordinate its behaviour?.  I enjoyed writing it and I think I did a pretty good job, too.  Since the anternet story had gotten a lot of attention in other places and I provided a different perspective, it caught the attention of a lot of people who hadn’t noticed my blog before.  It also helped that my take was a bit more level-headed than much of the other coverage, which focused on what the press release had emphasized. In some ways, that post felt like a coming-of-age for the blog, so I’ll always think of it fondly.

Another story I’m really pleased with is the one about the role of Hsp90 in shielding mutations from selection.  It’s a really exciting bit of research that I’ve known about for quite a while and wanted to write about from the moment I started my blog.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it justice, though, so I waited until my writing had improved enough to tell the story properly.  I’m glad that I did.  I’m very happy with the way the story turned out; it was even an Editor’s Pick over on ScienceSeeker!

Don’t limit yourself to just those two posts, though!  There’s a year and a half of archives to look through over on Inspiring Science and, more recently, I’ve also started writing on Accumulating Glitches.  Have a look at them, tell me what you like and what you think I could do better—and join the discussions!

So, plans for the future? More dabbling into science writing?

I hope to do much more than just dabble!  After I finish my PhD (hopefully by the end of this year!), I’m planning to commit myself to writing full-time.  I know it’s tough to make it as a writer, but I’ll never succeed if I don’t try!  I’d like to use the extra time I’ll have to post more frequently on my blogs and, more importantly, to start actually pitching stories.  I’m also looking forward to having the time to get to work on writing a book using my blog posts as a starting point.  In the long run, I’d love to be able to support myself solely by writing—everything from science writing to speculative fiction.  I realize that I’m extremely lucky to even have a shot at such a life, so I’m going to give it everything I’ve got and hope for the best!

Thank you!

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Previously in this series:

Kristina Ashley Bjoran
Emily Eggleston
Erin Podolak
Rachel Nuwer
Hannah Krakauer
Rose Eveleth
Nadia Drake
Kelly Izlar
Jack Scanlan
Francie Diep
Maggie Pingolt
Jessica Gross
Abby McBride
Natalie Wolchover
Jordan Gaines
Audrey Quinn
Douglas Main
Smitha Mundasad
Mary Beth Griggs
Shara Yurkiewicz
Casey Rentz
Akshat Rathi
Kathleen Raven
Penny Sarchet
Amy Shira Teitel
Victoria Charlton
Noby Leong and Tristan O’Brien
Taylor Kubota
Benjamin Plackett
Laura Geggel
Daisy Yuhas
Miriam Kramer
Ashley Taylor
Kate Yandell
Justine Hausheer
Aatish Bhatia
Ashley Tucker
Jessica Men
Kelly Oakes
Lauren Fuge
Catherine Owsik
Marissa Fessenden
Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato
Kelly Poe
Kate Shaw
Meghan Rosen
Jon Tennant
Ashley Braun
Suzi Gage
Michael Grisafe
Jonathan Chang
Alison Schumacher
Alyssa Botelho
Hillary Craddock
Susan Matthews
Lacey Avery
Ilana Yurkiewicz
Kate Prengaman
Nicholas St. Fleur
Dani Grodsky
Cristy Gelling
Shannon Palus
Kyle Hill
Allyson Green
Rebecca Burton

Named Thonis by the Egyptians who built it but known as Heracleion to the Greeks of the time, this great city was once a central part of ancient Egypt. Older than Alexandria, Thonis was probably founded during the eighth century BC. The city began on a downstream shore of the great Nile river where the land was fertile and freshwater was abundant. Thonis was strategically situated between the Mediterranean Sea and a great mostly landlocked lake, which also linked to the Nile river. The lake could (and indeed would) essentially be used as a huge parking space for ships….

Scientist: Cicadas can mate first before being studied by Kelly Poe:

The cicada emergence may be on its way out, but scientists are still swarming here to collect massive amounts of data on the billions of insects that have emerged across the East Coast since May. From North Carolina to New York, neighborhoods have been inundated with the red-eyed bugs and their ear-splitting summer song…

Art Competition Shows Off the Unexpected Beauty of Science by Nadia Drake:

Science isn’t just about collecting data and making charts and graphs. Experiments often produce moments of inspiring beauty: A dye dropped into water gives the impression of a green flame erupting from a murky black sea. Boring black cobalt oxide becomes brilliant blue when heated to 800 degrees Celsius. And an image of coral takes on a different character when two eyes suddenly peer out from its center…..

Will tiny drones cure Floridians’ cynicism toward hurricanes? by Rebecca Burton:

Most residents of Florida–a state constantly pummeled by tropical storms and hurricanes—have become overly cynical of the often hyped-up weather news warning that the latest tropical action in the Gulf of Mexico or off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean could be deadly….

Interactive map: Wisconsin’s most profitable state parks by Kate Prengaman:

This interactive graphic shows data for Wisconsin’s state parks in profits and visitors….

Sunday Comic: Toothbrushes and Toilets don’t Mix by Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

A couple of weeks ago, science and food writer Michael Pollan wrote a piece in the New York Times about the bacteria that surrounds us and lives within us. The reason I bring it up is that I have had trouble getting one specific bacterial “fun fact” out of my head….

Incredible Technology: How to See Inside the Mind by Tanya Lewis:

Human experience is defined by the brain, yet much about this 3-lb. organ remains a mystery. Even so, from brain imaging to brain-computer interfaces, scientists have made impressive strides in developing technologies to peer inside the mind….

Marked: A discussion of scars and their meanings by Caitlin Q. Davis, Rachel Feltman and Andrew Han:

Scars are a normal part of the body’s healing process after injury, causing fibrous tissue to replace normal skin. Whether we wear them as a badge of pride, hide them or forget about them, scars are a part of what makes us individuals. In this video by Caitlin Q. Davis, Rachel Feltman and Andrew Han, several people share what experiences have scarred them, and how their scars have shaped their life experiences…

Seaside petition by Laura Geggel:

Following the suspension in early May of two clinical trials of arbaclofen, a candidate drug for treating autism and fragile X syndrome, parents are appealing to the U.S. government and several pharmaceutical companies to continue testing the drug….

Even in the world’s richest country, it takes smartphones to end internet inequality by Rachel Feltman:

Cell phones are expected to bring the next billion internet users on board by 2015, but not all those new users will come from Africa and Asia. Plenty of them are members of late-adopting ethnic groups within the US…

Stem Cells May Be Secret to Regenerating Fingers and Toes by Tanya Lewis:

Mammals can regenerate the very tips of their fingers and toes after amputation, and now new research shows how stem cells in the nail play a role in that process A study in mice, detailed online today (June 12) in the journal Nature, reveals the chemical signal that triggers stem cells to develop into new nail tissue, and also attracts nerves that promote nail and bone regeneration….

Thriving Microbe Community Lives Beneath Seafloor by Douglas Main:

Beneath the seafloor lives a vast and diverse array of microbes, chomping on carbon that constantly rains down from above and is continually buried by a never-ending downpour of debris — some whale dung here, some dead plankton there. For the first time, a study has shown that these microbes are actively multiplying and likely even moving around in the compressed, oxygen-devoid darkness beneath the abyss….

New Project Will Send Your Messages to Potential Exoplanets by Miriam Kramer:

A group of scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs are tired of waiting around for E.T. to get in touch. Instead of passively listening for signs of intelligent life in the universe, the Lone Signal project is asking everyone with an Internet connection to help beam messages into outer space in an attempt to make our presence in the universe known….

What Butterflies Have in Common with Straws by Paige Brown:

What part of a butterfly is like a straw? If you guessed ‘their proboscis” for what butterflies have in common with straws, you are right! The butterfly proboscis is a slender, tubular feeding structure that works like a straw through which a butterfly drinks its food. When the butterfly first emerges from its pupa or chrysalis, its proboscis is actually in two parts that are later brought together and fused to create a structure that is hollow on the inside, like a straw. …

Seeing is believing — the visual interface by Sedeer el-Showk:

“Pics or it didn’t happen,” has become a common refrain in the camera-rich 21st century. We rely on our senses to report the world to us, and we tend to trust that their report is truthful. Eyewitness testimony is still generally considered strong evidence despite its demonstrable flaws. Our senses are the skein through which we perceive the world, and we assume that they provide a picture that’s roughly accurate. But what if we’re wrong? What if our senses aren’t honestly reporting the objective world, but rather simply constructing a useful metaphor? …

Is It True That More People Have Been in Space Than Seen a Siberian Tiger in the Wild? by Rose Eveleth

There are less than 350 Siberian tigers still alive in the wild. The beast has only been caught in fleeting footage, a tail here, a nose there. The BBC Natural History Unit, the department of the BBC that films documentaries like Planet Earth and other famous programs mostly hosted by David Attenborough, has never caught one on camera. Until now. …

Spotting the collapse of a species before it happens by Adam Kucharski

In the summer of 1992, the north Atlantic cod population collapsed. For five hundred years, the offshore fishery had been a central part of life on the Canadian coast. But overfishing had led to a sudden decline in stocks, with numbers falling to less than 1% of their earlier levels. …

How Do You Get Around If You’re Moving At A Snail’s Pace? by Sara Mynott

Geographic isolation is a key factor in the generation of new species, as it prevents diferent populations interbreeding. This lack of genetic exchange means the characteristics of the separated populations diverge, and gives rise to new species. This is why New Zealand, which has remained in isolation for 80 million years, and Hawaii, which has never been connected to another landmass, have so many species that are only found there. …

When Glaciers Get Dirty: Attack of the Cryoconites by Paige Brown

If you’ve ever jumped up from a chair or a car seat that was too hot because it had been exposed to the summer sun, you might be familiar with the fact that dark-colored materials absorb more heat than light-colored materials. Your black t-shirt or dark-colored leather car seat absorbs more heat from the summer rays than does your white t-shirt or tan-colored car seat. …

Water, water, everywhere by Jane Robb:

Water. It is one of the key components of our lives but also one of the defining factors of what we commonly refer to as our rocky planet and yet, 70% of Earth’s surface is covered in it. But let’s look again: when you compare the amount of water in volumetric terms to the volume of the rocky Earth, you find that water makes up less than 1% of the rocky volume of the Earth. That is, 1,386,000,000 km3 of water on Earth (including all water on, in and above the Earth) while the Earth is 1,083,206,916,846 km3 of rock! …

In a blog post published on 31 December 2012, PLOS BLOGS Network’s community manager Victoria Costello lists ten qualities she deems essential to make for “superior science blogging.” Costello’s list is comprehensive and is a good guide for any up-and-coming science blogger.

Throes of Creation by Leonid Pasternak (via Wikimedia Commons)

My number one advice to any newbie science blogger is to focus on posting quality writing. But what exactly is quality writing? Many of the “essential qualities that make for superior science blogging” listed by Victoria Costello, community manager of PLOS BLOGS Network, in this blog post from last year actually breaks down quality writing and blogging in some of its constituents.

Here are three essential qualities mentioned by Costello that I believe fall in the umbrella of quality writing:

• Make original research resonate with as many readers as possible
• Critique and put science back in the forefront
• Take a stand

Communicating science to as many readers as possible is very important especially considering the challenges mankind will face in the near future. By encouraging non-scientist readers to read (and engage with) science, science writers can sensitise those readers to the importance and sheer awesomeness of scientific research. In turn, those readers, as citizens, can make more informed decisions as they lobby or elect policy makers. I went into more detail about the importance of communicating science to the non-scientist audience here. (Obviously, not every science blogger aims to communicate science to a wide audience. Some reach out to their peers, others go into technical details about specific topics and some scientists use their blogs to communicate with their students or as online labbooks. But for this post, I’m dealing specifically with qualities of writers of popular science.)

It is as important to write about good science as it is to write about bad “science.” Pseudoscience, wacky “scientific” claims and pure and utter bull can cause real damage to real people. As a science blogger, you will undoubtedly come across such non-science. If you are capable of highlighting and debunk the bull, you have a moral need, not just as a writer but as a citizen of this Earth, to do so.

This brings me to the final and perhaps most crucial, though sadly, least observed point: take a stand. Science is an endeavour that can significantly improve lives, whether directly or indirectly. But it can also be used for the wrong reasons or simply be distorted to accommodate fraud ideologies or selfish desires. As a science blogger, you should not be afraid to take a stand when necessary. Being partial, while required in many cases, is not a golden rule you should always stick to. Global warming is a fact so why should you give equal merit to denialists, for example? Some have even argued that this stern notion of partiality inculcated in journalists is partly responsible for the death of investigative journalism.

Costello’s lists includes a further seven points that she considers essentials for superior science blogging. Some of them can be indirectly linked to quality science writing (“share a love of science,” “respect your readers”) while others offer more in terms of general guidance (“do it with attitude,” “show heart and humour”). In addition, Costello illustrates all of her points with some terrific blog posts from, yup, PLOS bloggers!

So, click and learn!

Today we introduce you to Rebecca Burton (blog, Twitter).

Hello, welcome to The SA Incubator. Let’s start from the beginning: where are you originally from?

I am from Pensacola, Fla., a small beach town about 10 minutes from Alabama where we use the word y’all and eat crawfish and grits. I moved to Miami when I was 18 to attend undergraduate school at Florida International University and learned very quickly that north Florida may as well be a different state from South Florida. I am now getting my master’s in science/health communication at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Fla., another small town with big alligators. I stress being a Florida native because this humid, wet and mushy state that often gets made fun of in the news, is part of the reason I am so interested in science to begin with.

How did you get into science and how did you get into writing? And how did these two trajectories fuse into becoming a science writer?

For me, writing came first. It was engrained in my head since I was in first grade, when I started writing poems for my mom and teacher, that I was going to be a writer. I just listened to the adults in my life and stuck with it. When I got to high school I realized writing cheesy poems probably wasn’t going to get me a stable career so I helped start my high school’s first newspaper and became editor-in-chief to get some experience in journalistic writing. I really owe a lot of my formal training to my high school journalism teacher, Mr. Pribble.

At the same time, I really enjoyed my high school science classes. They were really the only classes (besides journalism) that I actually looked forward to going to. Part of the reason was because of two teachers, Dr. Battaglia and Mr. Rittenhouse, who were always able to get anyone interested in their lessons—even the slackers—by making every single lesson hands-on. I think that aspect is sometimes missing from science classrooms today.  I found myself conflicted on what to do in college—should I major in biology or journalism?

I ended up majoring in journalism, but still took science classes as electives and ended up minoring in marine biology. Since I was self-admittedly a beach bum and surfer, marine life always piqued my interest. I wanted to figure out what was happening to deteriorating coral reef systems, and how to prevent the places I had come to call home from becoing part of a dead marine ecosystem. Since FIU was located on Biscayne Bay, the campus was overflowing with tons of timely and relevant research, so I ended up turning some of the stuff I was learning in my marine biology classes into stories for the school paper and environmental journalism conferences. The story I’m most proud of is one I wrote for FIU’s paper. I found out the provost was thinking of building an extra road into campus, but that it would require the bulldozing of mangroves. I decided to write a piece about how the bulldozing of the mangroves would affect Biscayne Bay. It may have not been the best story I’ve ever written, but it was the first environmental scoop that I followed and tackled to the end.

At the same time I was interning at the Miami Herald writing local and feature stories, but I never had as much fun writing those as I did scientific pieces. I expressed this to my editor, and luckily she was able to give me assignments about medical and environmental research.

What professional experience you have had so far—publications, internships, jobs? Feel free to include a bunch of links here! Do you write a personal or science blog? What is your current job?

Well, as far as journalism, I have had quite a few internships. I worked in the digital media department for NBC Miami and I have written for the South Florida News Service, the Miami Herald, the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire and Gainesville magazine. But, as far as science, health and environmental journalism I’m trying to pave my own way. I’ve found it’s kind of difficult for interns to pitch a science story that they’re really interested in to editors of mainstream media who do not necessarily place a priority on these types of stories.

Aside from some work for the Society of Environmental Journalists conferences and campus papers, most of my science writing has taken place on my personal blog Layman’s Terms Media (all of my clips and my resume can also be found there). I started the blog last summer before starting grad school. The blog has evolved quite a bit. It first started as merely a personal portfolio with all of my clips, videos and photos with some few-and-far-between posts about my “journey” to become a science writer. Now, I scan scientific journals and press releases to get ideas for actual science stories. Personal experience and curiosity is also a major generator of story ideas too.

I realized I was never going to get enough experience in science writing unless I actually did it. So, I started writing stories every time I got the chance. I am still experimenting with topics and writing style and trying to get a feel for who my audience is. But I can say that even being my own editor, I believe my writing has improved and I am building relationships with scientists and medical professionals that I will need throughout my career. My next goal is to really narrow the focus of my blog to one topic, but I feel that I need to experiment with many before I commit.

Currently, to make ends meet, I am trying to build my experience in the field by interning for Health News Florida where I assist in aggregating health news from all over the state as well as writing stories about health care policy. I also am an intern reporter for UF Health News and Communications, where I write about the medical research that is going on within the college. Even though this experience may be seen as more on the PR side, I still am using the experience to translate research to lay people and also to build relationships with medical experts. To pay my bills, I am a web producer for the Gainesville Sun, where I manage their website. There, I am getting experience writing headlines for the web, and organizing web content in a desirable way, which has helped me in organizing my blog. During the school year, I’m also a teaching assistant for a multimedia reporting course where I help undergraduates with editing video and audio.

Which science writing program do you attend? Why did you choose that one? What are your best experiences there?

To be honest, I was one of those people who applied to grad school in desperation. No jobs had shown up, and being a waitress without school loans wouldn’t have paid the bills in a big place like Miami. I discovered the science/health communication program at UF and it seemed like a great fit. I chose it mainly because it was in-state and also because the school had a great reputation.

When I got there, it was a lot different than I expected. We weren’t learning how to write science articles. The classes were not science journalism-101. Instead, the classes dove deep into the problems of science communication, science policy and how journalistic norms affect the quality of science writing today. By learning the problems and discussing solutions based on social science research, these courses—although not practical—have helped me become a more thoughtful science communicator.

Although most of the graduate-level courses in the program are more research-oriented, I was able to audit an undergraduate science writing class in the school of journalism, taught by Czerne Reid. In the class, she would hold Skype conferences with influential science writers who would give us advice on writing and networking. Everything I learned while attending that class is essential and I was lucky to have the opportunity to speak with such professionals.

My thesis is addressing these problems on a local scale. In Gainesville, there is a superfund site that has been plaguing residents for decades and frankly, they are not happy with both the EPA and the health department. I will be doing in-depth interviews with residents to try to figure out what the organizations did wrong in communicating the health risks of the contaminated area.

What are your plans for the future? Do you intend to dabble more with the science communication sphere? How are you hoping to break into the science writing business?

If you read my blog, you will also find out I am a hula hoop dance performer on the side. This is me hooping in the desert near Dubai, where I gave hula hoop lessons at the Middle East’s first Hoop-la festival.

I have a year left to graduate and my main goal is to keep improving my science writing and hopefully start getting a paycheck for it (isn’t that every grad’s dream?) I would love any job working for either a science publication, a newspaper that covers science and health in-depth, or even a science education organization. After all, part of my motivation for writing about science for lay people is to educate them.

I plan on breaking into the business by just practicing, and trying to get my name out there. I will continue writing for my blog, working hard at my internships and soaking in everything I learn in the remainder of my classes. At the same time, it never hurts to network and build professional connections through social media as well.

Thank you!

====================

Previously in this series:

Kristina Ashley Bjoran
Emily Eggleston
Erin Podolak
Rachel Nuwer
Hannah Krakauer
Rose Eveleth
Nadia Drake
Kelly Izlar
Jack Scanlan
Francie Diep
Maggie Pingolt
Jessica Gross
Abby McBride
Natalie Wolchover
Jordan Gaines
Audrey Quinn
Douglas Main
Smitha Mundasad
Mary Beth Griggs
Shara Yurkiewicz
Casey Rentz
Akshat Rathi
Kathleen Raven
Penny Sarchet
Amy Shira Teitel
Victoria Charlton
Noby Leong and Tristan O’Brien
Taylor Kubota
Benjamin Plackett
Laura Geggel
Daisy Yuhas
Miriam Kramer
Ashley Taylor
Kate Yandell
Justine Hausheer
Aatish Bhatia
Ashley Tucker
Jessica Men
Kelly Oakes
Lauren Fuge
Catherine Owsik
Marissa Fessenden
Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato
Kelly Poe
Kate Shaw
Meghan Rosen
Jon Tennant
Ashley Braun
Suzi Gage
Michael Grisafe
Jonathan Chang
Alison Schumacher
Alyssa Botelho
Hillary Craddock
Susan Matthews
Lacey Avery
Ilana Yurkiewicz
Kate Prengaman
Nicholas St. Fleur
Dani Grodsky
Cristy Gelling
Shannon Palus
Kyle Hill
Allyson Green

This week’s picks also features chimpanzees that are monkey hunters, the mites that have declared war against bees (and appear to be winning), the reason why scientists stare at elephants’ butts and more, courtesy of Paige Brown, Eric Sawyer, Rose Eveleth, Lacey Avery and Kate Shaw.

The other great up-and-coming science writers highlighted in this week’s picks are: Jon Tennant, Jane Robb, Laura Geggel, Rebecca Burton, Nadia Drake, Joss Fong, Helen Shen, Tania Lewis and Jessica Carilli.

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I Hate to Break it to You, but You Already Eat Bugs by Kyle Hill

I grabbed a box of cereal out of my cabinet. The flakes smelled stale, but I was hungry enough. I poured a cup or two into a bowl, followed by a splash of milk. Well into my third bite, I knew that stale cereal wasn’t all I was eating. I saw thrips—slender insects commonly known as corn lice—swimming in the bottom of the bowl, extending their legs in hopes of finding a flake—like a desperate swimmer in a flood. I immediately discarded the cereal, repulsed by the other bugs I had surely already eaten. But while I didn’t always see them, I had been eating bugs my whole life. So have you.

Your Meat Should Be Raised on Insects, U.N. by Arielle Duhaime-Ross

There has been a lot of press, both positive and negative, about a recent United Nations report in which scientists recommended that we start eating insects to fight world hunger. But the other U.N. recommendation—that farmers should consider feeding insects to poultry and aquacultured fish—did not garner nearly as much attention, despite seeming more feasible. After all, when given the opportunity, fish and chickens readily eat insects [...] But if feeding insects to animals presents so many advantages, why aren’t we doing it already?

They hunt in groups, share food and work together: Who are they? by Paige Brown

These characteristics are probably some of the traits we can all associate with chimpanzees, especially male chimpanzees, at least from what most of us know about them in movies, the media and museums. Those of us who know a bit more about the primate kingdom might know that chimpanzees are apes, that they form dominance hierarchies in their communities, and they are known to make use of plants and sticks as tools to fish for termites in termite mounds, for example.

It’s in the Honey! – Bee Diet and Defense Against Pathogens by Eric Sawyer

Honey bees have been in the news a lot lately, and unfortunately most of it hasn’t been good. Colony collapse disorder, or CCD, is a phenomenon where beehives are mysteriously found empty. This has made understanding the cause of CCD challenging, on top of the growing consensus that CCD probably arises from a multitude of risk factors.

To Measure Elephant Obesity, One Researcher Assesses Pachydermal Butts by Rose Eveleth

Animals aren’t particularly cooperative models, and anyone who’s ever tried to photograph animals—domesticated or wild—probably has a lot of pictures of butts. But for one researcher, butt pictures are worth quite a lot. Kari Morfeld, a researcher at the Wildlife Conservation Research Center, uses pictures of elephant backsides to assess how healthy the elephants are.

Scientists discover high mercury levels in Amazon residents, gold-mining to blame by Lacey Avery

The Madre de Dios region in Peru is recognized for its lush Amazon rainforests, meandering rivers and rich wildlife. But the region is also known for its artisanal gold mining, which employs the use of a harmful neurotoxin. Mercury is burned to extract the pure gold from metal and ore producing dangerous air-borne vapors that ultimately settle in nearby rivers.

Female breadwinners are a sign of progress—not an affront to science by Kate Shaw

According to a new Pew poll, women are the primary source of income in forty percent of all households with children. In 1960, mothers were the primary breadwinners in just 11 percent of households. Most rational people would see these findings as progress, since they suggest that women are no longer bound by the traditional gender stereotypes that have long kept them out of the workforce. They are an indication that gender equality is making strides in the right direction. At the very least, there’s no reason women with families shouldn’t have successful careers—right?

Some more:

• The rock whisperer by Jon Tennant and Jane Robb

• Following One Reader’s Nose by Rose Eveleth

• Brain stem grows differently in boys with autism by Laura Geggel

• Croaking Cuban frogs Create Competition in South Florida by Rebecca Burton

• Amazonian Treasure Trove Yields 15 New Bird Species by Nadia Drake

• Sizing up the mother in me by Joss Fong

• How the chicken lost its penis: Molecules that signal cell death quash nascent rooster genitals by Helen Shen

• Groovy Birds Dance the ‘Grapevine’ to Score Chicks by Tanya Lewis

• The Secret Life of Kelp by Jessica Carilli

Today we introduce you to Allyson Green.

Hello, welcome to The SA Incubator. Let’s start from the beginning: where are you originally from?

I grew up in Baraboo, WI, a few blocks from the Ringling Brothers Circus and a few miles from Aldo Leopold’s famous shack. I credit these distinctly different landmarks with helping form my sense of wonder and appreciation for all things great and small…and colorful.

How did you get into science and how did you get into writing? And how did these two trajectories fuse into becoming a science writer?

When I found myself reading friends’ Biology textbooks instead of my own Spanish textbooks during my first semester of college, I decided to make it official and change my major (don’t ask how much time I spent with those textbooks after I became a Biology major). With a grandpa who taught Botany and parents who could point out the Jack-in-the-Pulpits while hunting for morel mushrooms in the spring, it was hard not to have an appreciation for the natural world growing up. I had to feed the curiosity that my family cultivated for me early on.

I ended up studying Secondary Science Education at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI and had my first taste of science writing while writing lesson plans. I found them oddly delightful because I got to first do my own research on the subject and then figure out how to best communicate this to students who are in various stages of development with varying interest in and understanding of science. Most of my lessons focused on ecology, and my favorite part of writing was giving sample dialogue between teacher and students that culminated in that grand “Ah-ha!” moment.

As I deconstructed and reconstructed my own understanding of science in classes, I remember being completely awe-struck while exploring the nature of science. It turns out that science is not just a body of facts that are perfectly and painstakingly collected and cemented in stone by white guys in lab coats. Once I understood science—what questions it seeks to answer, what questions it cannot answer, and the process by which those questions are investigated—I made scientific literacy my mission in the world. There’s nothing like a conversation with a middle-schooler to bring a scientist back to the real-world. She is forced to step out of her own understanding in order to decipher the myths and facts lurking behind the student’s dead-on and dead-wrong ideas about the world. So, I imagined those conversations as I wrote and taught, often focusing not just on the subject at hand but on understanding the science behind and how it fits with the social, economic, and political systems in which we exist. Since then, I’ve had opportunities to really explore that intersection of science and those systems, and that’s where I continue to focus my efforts.

Can you briefly give insight on your writing process? Once you get a topic you’d want to write about, how do you proceed from there?

I take to the internet and follow every link I can about the topic until I’ve gotten so sidetracked and so psyched that I can finally narrow it down and get writing. There’s so much information available out there, and I want to make sure I’m not just saying the same thing everyone else has already said. I try to find an angle to a topic that hasn’t been considered much or that still has some misconceptions around it. Most of the time that involves confronting my own misconceptions, too!

Apart from writing, do you also do other aspects of science communication?

I’m still teaching, although my students are now mostly undergraduate students rather than middle-schoolers. I also dabble in nature photography, so my friends and family get a lot of hand-made photo cards with witty captions. They may not always appreciate the captions, but I hope they can appreciate the moment of wonder captured in the image and be encouraged to look for those moments in their own natural habitats.

What professional experience you have had so far—publications, internships, jobs? Feel free to include a bunch of links here! What is your current job?

After college, I served as an Americorps VISTA volunteer with the Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team in Wise County, VA. I coordinated environmental sustainability education and outreach events at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, focusing specifically on a wetland that filters acid-mine drainage on campus. While I wasn’t out in waders collecting aquatic critters with students, I worked with local non-profits and government agencies, becoming more literate in the ecological, economic, and cultural impact of resource extraction in the area. I then spent a couple years doing environmental education and community outreach at YMCA Camp Minikani in Wisconsin before going back to school.

I’m currently a student in the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and School of Public Health studying Environmental Justice and Environmental Health. It’s here that I resurrected those science writing skills while writing for Mind the Science Gap, a public health blog where students experiment with science communication, writing on everything from oil sands to vibrators. While I’m not working with students to establish the UM Sustainable Food Program and Campus Farm, I’m looking at noise, hearing, and stress in a small-scale mining community of northeastern Ghana.

What are your plans for the future? Do you intend to dabble more with the science communication sphere?

1. Graduate
2. Catch up on sleep
3. Put my communications skills into practice while working with neighbors locally and abroad to improve overall social and environmental well-being by coordinating efforts of nonprofits, government, faith communities, and universities
4. Start a blog…?

Thanks so much for this opportunity!

====================

Previously in this series:

Kristina Ashley Bjoran
Emily Eggleston
Erin Podolak
Rachel Nuwer
Hannah Krakauer
Rose Eveleth
Nadia Drake
Kelly Izlar
Jack Scanlan
Francie Diep
Maggie Pingolt
Jessica Gross
Abby McBride
Natalie Wolchover
Jordan Gaines
Audrey Quinn
Douglas Main
Smitha Mundasad
Mary Beth Griggs
Shara Yurkiewicz
Casey Rentz
Akshat Rathi
Kathleen Raven
Penny Sarchet
Amy Shira Teitel
Victoria Charlton
Noby Leong and Tristan O’Brien
Taylor Kubota
Benjamin Plackett
Laura Geggel
Daisy Yuhas
Miriam Kramer
Ashley Taylor
Kate Yandell
Justine Hausheer
Aatish Bhatia
Ashley Tucker
Jessica Men
Kelly Oakes
Lauren Fuge
Catherine Owsik
Marissa Fessenden
Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato
Kelly Poe
Kate Shaw
Meghan Rosen
Jon Tennant
Ashley Braun
Suzi Gage
Michael Grisafe
Jonathan Chang
Alison Schumacher
Alyssa Botelho
Hillary Craddock
Susan Matthews
Lacey Avery
Ilana Yurkiewicz
Kate Prengaman
Nicholas St. Fleur
Dani Grodsky
Cristy Gelling
Shannon Palus
Kyle Hill

On an overcast afternoon in late April, physics professors and students crowded into a wood-paneled lecture hall at Columbia University for a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed, a high-profile theorist visiting from the Institute for Advanced Study in nearby Princeton, N.J. With his dark, shoulder-length hair shoved behind his ears, Arkani-Hamed laid out the dual, seemingly contradictory implications of recent experimental results at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe….

Photographer Captures Stunning Killer Whale Attack on Dolphin by Nadia Drake:

When capturing prey, killer whales use a number of chilling tactics. Some of these, like repeatedly ramming into a pod of sperm whales, are seldom seen. Others, like stunning and flipping a creature out of the water and then eating it, are more frequently reported, but seldom captured in eerie detail…

Clinical research: Neurexin-1 deletions add to autism risk by Laura Geggel:

Deletions in neurexin-1 (NRXN1), a candidate gene for autism, may cause intellectual disability, speech delays, seizures, poor muscle tone and unusual facial features, according to two studies published in the past two months….

Cold, allergy, what’s the difference? Either way you’re drowning in snot by Nick Stockton:

Your eyes are swollen. Your nostrils are drooling. Your head feels like there’s a pillow stuffed inside of it, and your mouth is dry and scratchy, like you’ve been gargling kitty litter. For most of us, those symptoms add up to one of two options: allergies or a cold. So how can pollen elicit the same symptoms as a cold virus? Are colds and allergies related?….

Warning: Smoothies can cause sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia by Rebecca Burton:

It’s that time of year again. Summer. Hot. Humid. The urge to swap that hot coffee for a refreshing smoothie may overcome you. But beware, drinking cold drinks can cause a condition called sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia….

Study says chilling out – literally – may help us see eye to eye with others by Jordan Gaines:

Ah summer, and its sweltering temperatures. We get hot, we get cranky and many times, we squabble – sometimes over minor matters like what kind of hot dogs we should throw on the grill for our Memorial Day barbecue. Now researchers have discovered that chilling out – literally, like with a cold glass of ice water – may be the key to coming around to someone else’s point of view….

Finding One’s Grit: A Look at the Thing That Drives Us by Jessica Morrison:

In geology, grittiness is a characteristic of a mudstone taken between the teeth. In atmospheric chemistry, grit refers to solid particles suspended in the atmosphere. In journalism, gritty might be the reporter who digs in and doesn’t back down, the one who drinks and swears and smokes. But the most popular definition of late refers to what has become a desirable personality trait. In psychology, grit describes a quality of perseverance toward long-term goals….

In defense of dolphins by Naveena Sadasivam:

In the fall of 1985, a giant humpback whale named Humphrey attracted international fame when he lost his way while migrating southward to breed. He ended up swimming into the San Francisco Bay instead. For two weeks rescuers from The Marine Mammal Center in California and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration desperately tried to lead him back to sea but had little success. Finally, they called in Diana Reiss, a renowned dolphin researcher, to help. By then Humphrey was already 80 miles inland and his beautiful coat was decaying due to extended exposure to fresh water….

Low-wage workers find specialist care within their reach by Ian Branam:

Patricia Thiessen was driving in her hometown of Reno, Nev., when she suddenly lost the sight in her right eye. It returned within moments. Six weeks later, the same thing happened to her left eye. It was obvious something was seriously wrong. Thiessen, who does not have health insurance, went to her local hospital and took advantage of a free screening offer she had received in the mail. She discovered she was suffering from carotid artery disease, which would ultimately increase her risk of stroke. Plaque buildup in the arteries was blocking the blood flow to her brain and causing the episodes of blindness…

A New Environment for Testing Nanomaterials by Kate Prengaman:

Nanomaterials have a vast array of potential applications, from energy storage to drug delivery. But for medical applications, new technological breakthroughs also require careful scrutiny to ensure safety. Standard procedure for testing new medical treatments requires carefully controlled testing in live organisms, which is expensive. With a seemingly endless list of potential nanomaterials under consideration, researchers need affordable ways to zero in on their strongest prospects….

Monkeys in Florida? iPhonatography from a jungle in Central Florida by Rebecca Burton:

As I pondered ideas on what to do on Memorial Day Monday, I decided I needed to explore the land-locked area of Florida I often complain about, being a spoiled coastal girl who is accustomed to living near a beach. A friend mentioned a trip he took where he saw wild monkeys on an island in the middle of Silver River, near Silver Springs, Fla. After doing some preliminary research (mainly hear-say from Gainesville locals) I found out that Silver River was the filming site the early Tarzan movies. Some of the monkeys escaped, bred and hence that is why there are wild monkeys in Florida….

The Science Behind Teenager Grunts, Ughs and Duhs by Rose Eveleth:

Almost everybody gets annoyed, eventually, with teenagers. Parents find them confusing and difficult. Young adults look at them with both scorn and embarrassment. Children find them scary and mean. Even many teenagers hate teenagers. But not scientists. No, scientists find teenagers fascinating. Take linguists for example. The teenage armory of gasps, grunts, portmanteaus and slang are a linguistic gold mine. Here, James Harbeck, a linguist and editor at The Week, turns monosyllabic grunts into long, fancy, science words….

Nurse practitioners aim to fill care gap (video) by Alyssa Sellers:

More and more Americans, especially in rural areas, say they have no primary care doctor. And the situation may get worse before it gets better. As millions of people become newly insured in 2014 and the population grows, many are worried that those with new coverage will overwhelm the nation’s already short supply of primary care physicians….

The Password Is Dead. Long Live The Cryptic Biometric by Kathryn Doyle:

The times when a few upper case letters, some numbers and the odd punctuation mark made for a password of cryptic sophistication are long gone. Here’s where the future of secure logins, right under your finger(prints). …

Does a new approach to nuclear make economic sense? by Kate Prengaman:

Today, every nuclear power plant is unique, custom-built and run by site-specifically trained employees. This makes reactor construction expensive and, some argue, less safe because repairs require custom parts and one-off solutions. In recent years, nuclear energy advocates have been promoting an alternative—smaller, modular reactors that could be mass-produced. These cheaper, smaller, and standardized units could be a power solution for industries and municipalities that are looking to lower their carbon dioxide footprint….

Four ways augmented reality will invade your life in 2013 by Rachel Feltman:

With the impending arrival of Google Glass, augmented reality, long the stuff of science fiction, will soon be invading our every waking moment. It will turn us into faster learners, gamifying our everyday lives, transforming our to-do lists into streams of real-world next actions, and making advertising more intimate (and invasive) than ever. Next week, innovators from around the globe will gather for 2013’s Augmented Realty World Expo to show off some of the most useful—and improbable—applications of augmented reality. Here are some of the earth-shattering ways in which blending the virtual and digital worlds could change our lives….

Sound it Out: Do You “See” or “Hear” Words You Have to Spell? by Jordan Gaines:

I have an extraordinarily intelligent friend. Halfway through veterinary school, she’s a hard worker, an avid reader, and scores highly on standardized and academic exams. She’s simply fantastic at what she does, and I’ve met few other people in life with her brand of outstanding dedication and commitment. But there is one feature about her that is so strangely unexpected—so strikingly opposite her accomplishments—to the point where it’s just comical. She can’t spell to save her life….

Seasonal Mismatch – The Fight To Adapt To Advancing Spring by Kate Whittington:

….Here in the northern hemisphere after a long, hard winter, we all crave those first signs of spring, looking out for the first bright-faced daffodils to herald the apparent re-awakening of nature with their distinctive yellow trumpets. Despite the delayed spring observed this year in large parts of Europe and North America, the general trend over the last several decades is that spring is actually arriving earlier1,2. This may seem good news to those suffering from lingering winter blues, but for wildlife it can pose a huge problem. …

Can Bald Fish Get Lice? by Alexis Rudd:

As kids, many of us had the incredibly embarrassing experience of acquiring head lice. You tried on a friend’s silly hat at school and a few days later your head won’t stop itching. You tell an adult, and she says, “Oh no, you have lice!” You have to go to the store to buy a special fine-tooth comb, and a stinky, unpleasant shampoo. While the shampoo kills the adult lice, the eggs are protected inside their shells. The eggs are stuck to the strands of your hair, and it’s necessary to spend hours painstakingly removing them with the fine-toothed comb, or even painstakingly searching your scalp and picking the nits off your hair with fingernails. If all that is just too much work, you might even have your head shaved. This is quicker, but can lead to awkward conversations at school….

Gut Reaction: Human Colon Replica Demonstrates How E. coli Contaminates Groundwater by Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Scientists are great at growing E. coli in the lab. They know exactly under which conditions various strains thrive. Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be learned from the bacteria’s behavior in an ideal, isolated and ultimately unrealistic environment. That is why a group of researchers at the University of California, Riverside, decided to study how Escherichia coli O157:H7—a pathogen that can cause hemorrhagic diarrhea and kidney failure—is transmitted to groundwater after a human eats contaminated food….

Are You Ready for Helsinki? by Rose Eveleth, Lena Groeger, Erin Podolak and Kathleen Raven:

…. First, I’d like to clarify the definition of “killer.” It is used in this context according to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary’s definition: “slang : one who gives an admirable or irresistible personal or sartorial impression” (p. 1242 — in the ahem, paper, version). I think I speak for all of us when we will strive for an admirable personal impression. But even that word carries much weight. In the English language, “admirable” and “admiral” can play tricks on the ears. We know that one doesn’t earn the rank of admiral until late in a career, after much toil and risk…..

On a more joyous note, this week’s picks comprises numerous blog posts from Scitable blogs, which just relaunched this week [full disclosure: I am the Community Manager of Scitable blogs]. The blog posts span a variety of topics including physics, cosmology, evolution, psychology, geology, oceanography among others. Scitable bloggers highlighted this week are: Thomas Nguyen, James Keen, Sedeer el-Showk, Jon Tennant, Jane Robb, Sara Mynott, Bruce Braun, Dana Smith and Kate Whittington.

The other great up-and-coming science writers highlighted in this week’s picks are: Lily Hay Newman, Kate Yandell, Rebecca Burton, Cristy Gelling, Allie Wilkinson and Nadia Drake.

(You will notice that this week’s Picks breaks away from tradition. I’m experimenting with Spundge in an attempt to better curate great writings from up-and-coming science writers. Feedback appreciated in the comments!)

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SAI Weekly Picks

View “SAI Weekly Picks” on Spundge

Today we introduce you to Kyle Hill (Overthinking It, Twitter)

Kyle Hill is the latest addition to Scientific American’s blog network. He blogs about science in pop culture at Overthinking It. In addition, Kyle is also the blog manager of Student Voices, a group blog on Nature Education’s Scitable blogs [full disclosure: I am the Community Manager of Scitable blogs], and a research fellow at the James Randi Educational Foundation.

I’m glad to be able to prick Kyle’s brain about his fledgling blogger’s life today on The SA Incubator.

Hello and welcome to The SA Incubator. To start off, why did you get started writing about science?

Thanks for having me Khalil. I started writing about science shortly after I finished my undergraduate degree in engineering. I’ve always had a passion for science and for geeky things, and my education gave me the tools to start making sense of it all. When I first started writing, it was mostly about skeptical topics like the full moon’s “effect” on human behavior and Ouija boards. But these topics were really just a focused scientific perspective. I soon branched out, applying a scientific perspective to anything and everything.

You have a certain knack in mixing science with popular culture. Why did you choose such an approach?

My writing style was less of a conscious choice and more of a consequence of how I spoke with friends and family. You often hear from science writers that they aren’t the best people to see a sci-fi movie with, as they always point out the scientific inconsistencies. I was always like that, but with everything (sounds fun doesn’t it?). When I found a platform for my pedantry, I just let it all out.

You are a very prolific writer. How do you get ideas for your blog posts and articles?

At this point in my career, I consider myself less of a science journalist and more of a science writer. By that I mean I don’t really follow the study/embargo beat, nor do I have a rolodex of scientists I check up on for interesting research. Most of my ideas come from talking with friends and especially from my significant other. When I wrote my article about trying to save a character from Firefly, probably my most popular to date, it was right after I watched the movie Serenity, with my jaw still on the floor. I started looking up NASA data on windshield strength, quickly coming to a back-on-the-envelope conclusion that I couldn’t save the character. It was my girlfriend who encouraged me to frame the story like a tragedy, and I think the post was so popular because it was a fanboy’s failed attempt to save his psyche. I get a lot of my ideas from just indulging my nerdy side. I think the fact that the posts do well means that others like to nerd-out too.

A recent blog post in the Guardian, argued that in addition to “infotainment” articles, there is a need for more critical science journalism. What are your views on this?

I have to take a defensive stance on this. I don’t see the divide. In that article, the author notes how “infotainment” articles are easier to write, and are kind of a geeky release for him, while “critical” writing requires much more research and effort. Personally, I don’t know what he means. To write some of my pieces, I have had to take crash courses in quantum mechanics and fluid dynamics, staring at a screen for hours before I grasp the story. I have spent days pouring over the physics in The Legend of Zelda, and I think readers loved me for it. You can entertain and be critical at the same time. The kind of pieces I write are much less “critical” than a piece on the new diagnoses in the DSM, for example, but I believe that I can do critical science writing that entertains people no matter the topic. “Critical” science journalism and writing are tools, not topics.

Would you say that your writing falls in the “infotainment” side? Why are such articles important?

I would. For me, science is not just a new paper or conference, it’s a way to understand the world. When appropriate, you can apply it to odd topics and learn something. I think infotainment articles connect the fandom and geekiness that we all have with the real world. We love our book and movies and videogames, and when someone can construct a bridge from your favorite fiction to reality, I think it makes the love grow. It’s another way to dig into canon once all the credits have rolled.

The fact is that most people have an “ivory tower” conception of science. Infotainment articles are probably the most important Trojan horse in science communication for changing this view. If I can help someone learn about kinetic energy with Superman, a character they know and love, instead of a textbook, why not?

You are also a skeptic. Why are skeptics important in science communication? What do you bring to the table—to readers?

Skepticism is the foundation of science and scientific thinking. A lot of people think it is a closed-minded approach to the world, but really it is just a bar that claims have to pass. Like the evidence that must be present for the Higgs boson to be found, there has to be some real evidence before ghosts, psychics, and anti-vaccinationists are taken seriously. Good science communication is skeptical. Science journalists, covering a brand new study, will call relevant scientists to see what they think about it. They will weigh the new study against the existing body of literature. Skepticism does the same. Does homeopathy really work? We look at all the reviews of the literature and base the conclusion on science (it doesn’t).

My work in the skeptical community has taught me that those who love science, scientists even, harbor a lot of curious biases that they may not realize. When researching claims about the paranormal or pseudo-scientific, skeptics latched on to psychological concepts like the confirmation bias and fundamental  attribution error. Both biases can grossly distort our perception of risk, which can lead us astray when evaluating cancer screening, for example. We see this conflict when the old journalist’s adage to “be balanced” bumps into a scientific consensus on climate change. There really is no balance between deniers and scientists.

The desire to be scientifically accurate, to be skeptical, has introduced a number of concepts into science writing that I don’t think would be there otherwise. I hope to bring this to my writing.

Which story of yours do you like best?

It sounds a little self-serving, but I really enjoyed writing the stories that were acknowledged by their subjects. Nathan Fillion, the captain himself, tweeted that my Firefly story was his favorite rant to date. Adam Savage, host of the Mythbusters, said the same about my article looking back on 10 years of the show. I don’t like these stories because they are popular, but because they validate the geeks around the world who love the shows I write about. I try to be a vessel for the fanboys and girls. Loving science often means that a suite of other loves come along with it. I want to show that, to quote Wil Wheaton, “it’s not what you love, but how you love it.” If I can write a popular piece that mixes science and pop-culture, to show that you can obsess about whatever you want and be proud of it, then I’ve done my job.

What are your plans for the future? Do you intend to dabble more with the science communication sphere?

I am still thinking about a possible PhD program in the future, but for now I am trying my hand at freelance science writing and blogging for Scientific American. Honestly, looking at the market, I’m just happy to have an outlet. My philosophy for science writing has been that if I am diligent and produce good work, that eventually good things will come of it. So rest assured, more nerdiness is coming.

Thank you!

====================

Previously in this series:

Kristina Ashley Bjoran
Emily Eggleston
Erin Podolak
Rachel Nuwer
Hannah Krakauer
Rose Eveleth
Nadia Drake
Kelly Izlar
Jack Scanlan
Francie Diep
Maggie Pingolt
Jessica Gross
Abby McBride
Natalie Wolchover
Jordan Gaines
Audrey Quinn
Douglas Main
Smitha Mundasad
Mary Beth Griggs
Shara Yurkiewicz
Casey Rentz
Akshat Rathi
Kathleen Raven
Penny Sarchet
Amy Shira Teitel
Victoria Charlton
Noby Leong and Tristan O’Brien
Taylor Kubota
Benjamin Plackett
Laura Geggel
Daisy Yuhas
Miriam Kramer
Ashley Taylor
Kate Yandell
Justine Hausheer
Aatish Bhatia
Ashley Tucker
Jessica Men
Kelly Oakes
Lauren Fuge
Catherine Owsik
Marissa Fessenden
Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato
Kelly Poe
Kate Shaw
Meghan Rosen
Jon Tennant
Ashley Braun
Suzi Gage
Michael Grisafe
Jonathan Chang
Alison Schumacher
Alyssa Botelho
Hillary Craddock
Susan Matthews
Lacey Avery
Ilana Yurkiewicz
Kate Prengaman
Nicolas St. Fleur
Dani Grodsky
Cristy Gelling
Shannon Palus

Visiting a rainforest can be an exercise in challenged expectations. Everyone knows that rainforests are full of life: they teem with species, act as stages for unimaginably intricate food webs, and provide refuge for rare and even undiscovered organisms that exist nowhere else in the world. And yet . . . dense tropical forests can appear deceptively devoid of animals. One can spend hours and even days hiking through the Amazon’s cathedrals of green without spotting many animals beyond buzzing insects and snatches of birdsong from overhead. There are millions of organisms around, to be sure, yet they are all woven so tightly into their environment as to be almost indistinguishable from the forest itself….

Horsepower by Cristy Gelling:

We tend to think of nineteenth century cities like Pittsburgh as industrializing under the power of steam. But Joel Tarr argues that an older technology also drove the development of the great cities of the steam age. In 1775 James Watt patented the steam engine, a machine that would become a symbol of the industrial revolution. Forty years later, Benjamin Latrobe opened a steamboat engine workshop on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. The power source that Latrobe used to build his engines? Two blind horses…

The Lemur Underground: New Evidence for Primate Hibernation by Anne-Marie Hodge:

From bears slumbering through the winter in their dens to frogs sinking into muddy tombs of suspended animation, a wide spectrum of animals resort use hibernation to survive until spring. Just a mention of hibernation conjures images of snow-blanketed forests and ice-covered ponds, with animals hiding out from barren, dormant wintry landscapes. A group of small tropical primates is breaking the trend, however—recent research demonstrates that several dwarf lemurs in Madagascar undergo seasonal hibernation periods for up to eight months of the year. While it had previously been known that the western fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius) spends seven months of the year hibernating in tree holes (Dausmann et al. 2004), until recently there was no evidence for any other primate undertaking significant hibernation periods….

The rise of a frog-killing fungus pinned in part on global trade by Kate Prengaman:

It’s a tough time to be a frog. A fungal disease known as chytridiomycosis has been decimating populations across the planet for about a decade. Since its discovery in the late 1990s, it has already wiped out about 100 species. Although it seemed to appear suddenly, a team of scientists has now published the evolutionary history of the fungus, which suggests that chytridiomycosis has been killing amphibians for thousands of years….

Last laugh: What evolution can tell us about why we laugh by William Herkewitz:

Night falls and I’m still in bed. The sheets are hot and damp from two days of fever, and if I’m getting any better, I can’t feel it. When a good friend of mine calls and asks how I’m doing, I admit I am miserable. “Well, worst case scenario,” he jokes, “you’ll be dead in a few hours.” He laughs a deep and sadistic laugh, and I can’t help it, I laugh too. We talk for a bit longer, he wishes me well, and hangs up the phone. Still ill and not too happy about it, I am left alone in my room with the echo of my laugh and a question. Why do we laugh when we’re feeling awful?…

The Joy of Stats by Tania Browne:

You might not realise it, but statistics rule your life. Think about that for a minute. Because even if you claim you know nothing about maths, maths knows a lot about you. Consider what you did even when you woke up this morning. After you brushed your teeth, you might have put on some face cream that you bought because the TV advert told you 87% of people who used it reported an improvement in the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. But did you also read the small print at the bottom which said it was 87% of 93 people, tested for a week?…

NIMH Won’t Follow Psychiatry ‘Bible’ Anymore by Emily Underwood:

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—slated for release this month—has lost a major customer before even going to print. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), declared last week on his blog that the institution will no longer use the manual to guide its research. Instead, NIMH is working on a long-term plan to develop new diagnostic criteria and treatments based on genetic, physiologic, and cognitive data rather than symptoms alone….

Re-conceiving the male “pill” by Andrew P. Han:

Since the advent of the birth control pill in 1960, new contraceptives have mostly been hormone-based products for women. But a recent push from researchers may lead to a breakthrough that for decades has seemed just out of reach: a male birth control pill….

How Many Weddings Will the Cicadas Ruin This Summer? by Rose Eveleth:

As the spring warms the earth in the eastern United States, one of the largest insect emergences on the planet is about to happen. Seventeen years after their last appearance, cicadas from this brood will wiggle out from the ground, shed their skin and take to the skies. This is what that looks like (GIF by T. Nathan Mundhenk):…

Slow Food Madison takes on stronger social justice focus by Emily Eggleston:

The Mexican-themed meal included a layered corn tortilla dish with shredded chicken and ancho chile sauce, a side of diced zucchini, corn, and roasted red peppers, along with a spinach salad dressed with garlic-stuffed olives and chickpeas. Many Goodman Community Center diners went back for a second serving of the meal prepared by Slow Food Madison, a meal that one diner called his “absolute favorite community food program.”…

Brain Is Command Center for Aging by Kate Yandell:

Inflammation in the hypothalamus may underlie aging of the entire body, according to a study published today (May 1) in Nature. Over-activation of the inflammatory protein nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) in the brain region leads to a number of aging-related changes in mice, from cognitive decline to muscle weakness. Unexpectedly, this process promotes aging at least in part by suppressing gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), which stimulates adult neurogenesis….

Erectile function: bats mop up nectar with “hairy” tongues by Kate Shaw:

As sweet as the reward is, it isn’t easy being a nectar-feeder. Bats, hummingbirds, and bees face the difficult task of sipping as much nectar as possible from a tiny floral tube, all while hovering delicately in the air. And since hovering is such an energy-demanding task, the more efficiently these animals can slurp up nectar, the better they do on each visit to a flower….

The laser-toting, secret Soviet satellite that never was by Amy Shira Teitel:

On the evening of Wednesday, March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan delivered a televised address about defense and national security. “Let me share with you a vision of the future,” the president began in what was a last-minute addition to the half-hour speech. In Reagan’s vision, we would “embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive.” It was the first mention of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the plan to change America’s nuclear posture from offensive to defensive. His goal was to render the Soviet nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.”…

Inoculation from the Internet: Synthetic biology and the World Wide Web are teaming up to modernize our flu vaccines by Taylor Kubota:

Four years ago, the H1N1 swine flu emerged, launching the United States into its first influenza pandemic in 40 years. By the spring of 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that at least 43 million Americans had been infected with the virus. Even after this landmark flu season ended, its impact inspired Dr. Philip Dormitzer and his colleagues to make some radical changes to the way we create flu vaccines. When the H1N1 season reached its peak in late October of 2009, the vaccines were only just becoming available. In general, vaccines aren’t obtainable until about five or six months after a virus is first identified. Now, Dormizter, the leader of viral research at the private pharmaceutical lab Novartis, is using downloadable DNA sequences and custom-made synthetic viruses to give vaccine production a long-awaited speed boost….

The Sunday morning special: Curing the painful and persistent hangover by Ben Guarino:

The smell of regurgitated margaritas is surprisingly pleasant — the room now has a fresh citrus scent, like a handful of orange Tic Tacs. The rest of your existence, however, is misery. You are enervated, dehydrated and in desperate need of a shower. When you pick up the trash bag filled with taco bits, orange margarita mix and too much tequila, the garbage feels as warm as a suppurating wound. Not for the first time, you promise you’ll drink less in the future. Not for the first time, you wonder what makes hangovers so difficult to get rid of….

Sensing Calories Without Taste by Francie Diep:

Scientists have engineered fruit flies that can’t taste sugar, and, at first, the insects will show no preference between sugar water and plain water. But after 15 hours without food, the flies start to choose the sugar water, seemingly sensing the fact that the liquid contains life-sustaining calories even though they can’t taste anything….

Mapping the Geology of Skyrim by Jane Rob:

If you have been following this project you will know that I am attempting to develop a mod for the popular video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The mod is meant to be educational – but not in a conventional sense. I want people to play it and not feel like they are being forced to learn something, rather for people to play it because they want to and in the process of the game realise that there is something useful here….

Mosquito-borne diseases: Fighting fire with fire by Markus Hammonds:

I have a decidedly “live and let live” approach to life. There are no animals in this world which I harbour any malicious feelings towards, regardless of how many of those animals would think nothing of poisoning, eating, maiming, or otherwise killing me (it’s a tough world out there). No animals, with one exception. I absolutely detest mosquitos – and not irrationally so…

How needing a wee affects your decision making by Neurobonkers:

A couple of years ago Dr Mirjam Tuk won an IgNobel prize for the paper “Inhibitory Spill-Over: Increased Urinating Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains” in Psychological Science. Tuk recently discussed her research at Imperial College Science Festival. You might think that your ability to do a task would be worsened by the feeling of needing to go for a wee, but a look at the evidence suggests the opposite might be the case. I’ll summarise the findings of Tuk’s research below:…

Bioengineers go retro to build a calculator from living cells by Akshat Rathi:

Scientists in the US have developed a calculator from living cells, using old-fashioned analog programming. Their hope is that the technology could be used in the future to program cells to kill cancer….

Misophonia: Enraged by Everyday Sounds by Jordan Gaines:

I consider myself to be a pretty tolerant person. I’ll eat just about any food you place in front of me. I’ll read any book genre. I’ll listen to any musical artist someone plays for me, even if I dislike it. But there’s one teeny little thing you can do around me that will set my teeth on edge. I’ll sit, transfixed, unable to pay attention to the task and hand, my blood boiling and heart racing. I want to run. I want to scream…

Male Black Widows Sniff Out Femme Fatales by Sarah Jane Alger:

Sexual reproduction is a costly affair, but the costs are not usually equal for males and females. Among animals, females generally produce larger gametes (eggs are way bigger than sperm), spend more energy gestating or incubating the young before they are born, and spend more effort caring for the young after they are born. It’s no wonder then that across animal species, females are typically more choosy of who they mate with than males are….

The Science of Earth and the Human Policies that Change It by Charles Ebikeme:

“The science of Earth and the human policies that change it.” This will be the tagline of the new Environment group blog on Scitable. The science is the easy part (he says without a hint of hyperbole). More and more we shall come to learn that the most difficult thing, the most complicated mechanisms, the most complex systems at play, lay quite firmly on the human side. On the human interactions and manipulations of Earth….

Frogs Swallow Using Eyeballs: Exhibit Reveals Creatures’ Quirks by Tanya Lewis:

Neon green, vivid orange, striped and spotted — the frogs are back! An exhibit featuring live frogs from around the world is returning to the American Museum of Natural History here in New York….

An innovative way to aid the uninsured while reducing ER costs by Julianne Wyrick:

In Athens, a city where 35 percent of residents live in poverty, many people can neither afford health insurance premiums nor pay out of pocket for services. As a result, hospital emergency rooms may be the only option that uninsured people see for themselves – even though they may have chronic diseases and not the sudden illnesses or injuries that emergency rooms are meant to handle….

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This blog post by Sedeer El-Shwok on his blog Inspiring Science is fascinating for horrible reasons. Reading about cockroaches is one thing but reading about wasps that manipulate cockroaches, drain off their hemolymph (essentially the insect’s blood) and lay eggs on them so that the larvae can eat the cockroaches from the inside… that’s… that’s… I’m lost for words…

The wasp and the cockroach: a zombie story

The world of parasites is full of incredible tales of manipulation and mind-control as these creatures twist their hosts to their needs.  Ever since I first heard of parasitoid wasps, I’ve been drawn to them by a delicious mixture of schadenfreude and intellectual fascination.  (Technically, parasitoids are slightly different from parasites, but that’s not important right now.)  Some of the examples of manipulation by parasitoid wasps are just wonderfully, horribly macabre.  I briefly mentioned the emerald cockroach wasp in a previous post; this time I’ll give a few other examples and explain the emerald wasp more thoroughly [...]

Moving swiftly on, young blood can keep an old heart in a healthier and younger state—at least in mice. Douglas Haven in New Scientist covers a new study which shows that GDF11, a protein present in larger quantities in young blood, may be responsible for this rejuvenating effect.

Young blood reverses heart decline in old mice

Out with the old, in with the new. Pumping young blood around old bodies – at least in mice – can reverse cardiac hypertrophy – the thickening and swelling of the heart muscle that comes with age and is a major cause of heart failure. Previous studies have shown that an infusion of blood from young mice has rejuvenating effects on the brain of old mice, prompting new cell growth and reversing some of the effects of cognitive decline.

Stunning piece about eyes by Rose Eveleth in new science magazine Nautilus. Filled with stunning closeup photos of stunning eyes obviously.

Humanizing Animals With the Most Human Eyes

People place incredible importance on their eyes. They’re arguably our default tool for perceiving the world, and one of the primary ways we remember and describe one another. Your eye color is on your birth certificate, driver’s license, and online dating profile. Those who make eye contact are considered more competent, friendlier, and more professional. Online commenters forced to make eye contact with others while writing leave nicer comments. Audiences favor musicians who look at the crowd, and children who don’t make eye contact are flagged as troubled.

Great journalism by Rachel Nuwer this one. The role of politics in solar energy technology, or lack thereof. For Ensia.

Breaking the Solar Logjam

Politics and society, not science and technology, are preventing solar energy from shining. The sun has long been seen as one of the most promising power sources of the future. Plentiful, clean and free, solar energy tantalizes with the promise of solving the global energy crisis and alleviating climate change.

In a post at io9 that’s surely going to ruffle some feathers, Robert Gonzalez gives five tasty reasons as to why wine tasting is not very tasty. After reading the post, you’ll probably need some wine. Why? You’ll see… er taste… er…

Wine tasting is bullshit. Here’s why.

The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses. This begs an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or is it complete and utter bullshit? There are no two ways about it: the bullshit is strong with wine. Wine tasting. Wine rating. Wine reviews. Wine descriptions. They’re all related. And they’re all egregious offenders, from a bullshit standpoint.

A very informative writeup by Nadia Drake over at Wired about a Killer Whale attack on a dolphin—captured on photos.

Photographer Captures Stunning Killer Whale Attack on Dolphin

When capturing prey, killer whales use a number of chilling tactics. Some of these, like repeatedly ramming into a pod of sperm whales, are seldom seen. Others, like stunning and flipping a creature out of the water and then eating it, are more frequently reported, but seldom captured in eerie detail. Earlier this year, a pod of killer whales in the Monterey Bay was on the hunt for dolphins. Aboard a boat following the pod was photographer Jodi Frediani. Over roughly 45 minutes, she and the others observed the killer whales pursuing and catching a long-beaked common dolphin, with Frediani taking some stunning photographs of the high-speed hunt.

Some more great stuff:

• Why an eating disorder case study shouldn’t have made national news by Arielle Duhaime-Ross for Canadian Science Writers Association
• #Sci4hels Question Time #5 – What is the obligation of a science journalist when it comes to education? by Erin Podolak on her blog Science Decoded
• Nonvolitional health: Helping you get healthier without you even realizing it by Taylor Kubota for Scienceline
• NC offers free nicotine replacement therapy to smokers who want to quit by Kelly Poe for newsobserver.com
• Jurassic Park or Noah’s Ark by Alex Gwyther for I, Science.

New Orleans Item newspaper news room, circa 1900 (from Wikimedia Commons)

As more and more science writing is done specifically for the web, the way science writers pen their stories is subtly and not-so-subtly changing. Writers are becoming increasingly conscious of search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media optimisation (SMO) for instance. And they are taking those into account as they write. Is this affecting science writing online for the better or worse? And does it matter at all?

Matt Shipman has an interesting interview with Wil Reynolds, a founder of internet agency SEER Interactive, on his SciLogs.com blog [full disclosure: I am the Community Manager of SciLogs.com]. In the interview, Reynolds gives some advice to writers as to how they can use SEO to ultimately get more eyeballs.

Reynolds makes sure to make mention that SEO should not alter your writing however: “As a writer, I would say never put words where they don’t belong just for SEO.” Instead, Reynolds advises writers to look for and cover topics which have the potential to do well on search engines.

Of course, this in itself is a problem. By only focusing on topics that can do well on search engines, writers will disproportionately cover the sensational topics and those that are regularly in the news, such as climate change for example. Other equally important issues may not be picked up. All in all this leads to amplifying a filter bubble of sorts.

But as SEO and SMO become more prevalent in online writing, it is naïve to not expect writers to accommodate these practices in their writings. Numerous online publications for instance already A/B test various titles per article. Others use one title for social media promotion and a different one that is specifically search engine-optimised on their website.

While altering titles may not be that big of a deal, it is only the beginning. Frequently linking to articles or blog posts from one’s own publication is an SEO tactic that’s widely used. Writing a lede filled with SEO-friendly words is another. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a few social media editors are drafting new SEO guidelines for journalists to incorporate in their writings right now.

My point is that SEO and SMO are obviously changing online writing. And it’s happening right now. Is it a good or  bad thing? I don’t think it can be polarised as such. All writers want to be read and if SEO and SMO are done right, writers will likely get more readers. But abusing those strategies at the detriment of the writing is not the way to go because content should always be king.

The question then is: can writers do good SEO and SMO without compromising the quality of their writing? Can you?  Upcoming science writers should also think about how adequate use of SEO and SMO can promulgate science communication to the masses. Do share your thoughts and your SEO and SMO strategies in the comment section.

Little is known about the silver dik-dik (Madoqua piacentinii) population that roams the dense coastal bushlands of eastern Africa, but experts are working to learn more about the mysterious species….

Deaths triple among football players, morning temperatures thought to play a role by Kathleen Raven:

Heat-related deaths among football players across the country tripled to nearly three per year between 1994 and 2009 after averaging about one per year the previous 15 years, according to an analysis of weather conditions and high school and college sports data conducted by University of Georgia researchers….

Can Synthetic Biology Keep Your Food Safe? by Julianne Wyrick:

On a hot summer day, nothing spells refreshment quite like a slice of juicy, orange cantaloupe. But in summer 2011, cantaloupes reached plates with an unwanted addition: listeria. In the deadliest foodborne illness outbreak since 1925, cantaloupes contaminated with this bacterium killed 33 people….

#sci4hels Question Time #4 – How Should Science Journalists Deal with Breaking News? by Rose Eveleth:

Last week was sort of a nightmare for everyone. Between the Boston marathon bombings and ensuing man-hunt, the explosion at the fertilizer plant in Texas, the earthquakes in China and Iran, the bombs in Baghdad, and whatever else I’m missing. Oh, did I mention the elvis impersonator who mailed ricin to the president? Yeah, that happened too, and nobody paid attention because we were all too busy wondering what had happened to the world. It was that kind of week….

Why the Anatomy Lab Remains a Fixture of Medicine by Tanya Lewis:

For hundreds of years, physicians have been dissecting the dead to learn about the inner workings of the human body. While the subject matter itself hasn’t changed much, the study of anatomy has been steadily advancing — both in terms of the tools available to clinicians and the ways in which educators and students approach the material. Yet amidst these changes, there’s no replacement for the hands-on experience of the anatomy lab, physicians say….

History, Science and the History of Science by Emily Eggleston:

Oxford radiates prestige. The city boasts more than a thousand years of learned history and is one of few British locales with a royal coat of arms. The university glows with momentous locations, such as the place where Robert Boyle discovered Boyle’s law in the seventeenth century and the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile in 1954. …

Angelman syndrome drug shows promise in mouse study by Laura Geggel:

Two weeks of treatment with a cancer drug called topotecan boosts expression for a year of the gene that’s deficient in Angelman syndrome, according to unpublished research presented 20 March at the New York Academy of Sciences….

‘Time Crystals’ Could Upend Physicists’ Theory of Time by Natalie Wolchover:

In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of “time crystals” — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. Unlike clocks or any other known objects, time crystals derive their movement not from stored energy but from a break in the symmetry of time, enabling a special form of perpetual motion….

Photographer Captures Dramatic Battle Between Orcas and Sperm Whales by Nadia Drake:

If killer whales lived on land, we’d be in trouble. Highly intelligent and social, the black-and-white marine mammals hunt in packs, launching coordinated attacks on other whales and sharks, and even wave-wash seals off Antarctic ice floats….

Devil Dispatch: MHC the Key to Contagious Cancer Vaccine? by Anne-Marie Hodge:

The contagious cancer currently ripping through Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) populations has captivated public attention and imagination. The reasons for this are understandable. First, in a world where cancer kills 7.6 million people every year, just the idea of tumor cells that can be passed along between individuals like a cold or flu is a horrific notion to contemplate—a concept straight out of a cheap thriller novel. Also, the irascible Tasmanian devil has a sort of anti-charisma—fearsome temper, frightening countenance (even before infection with deadly facial tumors), and a name with sinister connotations . . . how can we help but love it?…

Plan B Must Be Available OTC For Women And Girls Of All Ages, Federal Judge Rules by Francie Diep:

A federal judge ruled today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration must make emergency contraception—often called the “morning after pill” or by its brand name, “Plan B”—available over-the-counter for girls and women of all ages. The administration must comply within 30 days, Judge Edward R. Korman of the Federal District Court said….

Infographic: Urinary tract infection by Susan E. Matthews:

Recognizing symptoms, getting the right treatment.

Check Your Privilege by Tania Browne:

As a leftie feminist who follows many other leftie feminists on Twitter, the phrase “check your privilege” has been popping up rather a lot recently. I’m no intellectual theorist but to me, it seems to be about realising how lucky you are in many ways even if in others, the world is against you. Those “lucky” parts might affect how you see others or speak about issues, and you should be careful not to assume that everyone sees the world through your eyes. For instance, I’m a woman. It’s still a disadvantage in the world for millions. But also, unlike many women I am white, I have no disabilities, I identify as a woman and was born in a woman’s body, I am the mother of a typical nuclear family in a wealthy rural part of the UK. My husband is a pleasant chap I chose myself and doesn’t seek to control me, either economically or through violence…

Flying High – 54th Annual Drosophila Research Conference (#dros2013) by Eric Sawyer:

From April 3 to 7 I attended the 54th annual Drosophila Research Conference in Washington DC, my first fly genetics conference. I began working in my college’s fruit fly genetics lab last semester as an undergraduate project and have come to enjoy using flies as a powerful tool for answering fundamental questions about developmental genetics and cell biology…..

Measles – how was a preventable disease allowed to kill again? by Emy Martyn:

Recent headlines have put measles back into the public perspective, but what’s behind the recent outbreak? How was a treatable disease allowed to kill again? Many headlines in Britain’s top news reporting websites, from the BBC and Guardian to the Metro, have been bearing the news of the recent outbreak in Wales. Since November, nearly a thousand people have been infected, 83 people hospitalised, and reportedly one man has died. The NHS is supplying the MMR vaccination to 4000 pupils in the Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion areas. But how come these teenagers and children require the vaccine? Why were they not already vaccinated when they were infants? And even if they weren’t immunised, surely measles wouldn’t cause such large rates of infection due to its very low infection rate over the last few decades….

The battle to end polio by Alice Tobin:

Vaccination has saved children across the globe from the crippling effects of polio. Now, a final push aims to eradicate it entirely by 2018. We have an unprecedented opportunity to rid the world of polio. Last year, just 223 children worldwide were paralysed by the disease, the lowest it has ever been, and only 19 cases have been recorded so far in 2013. Global eradication of polio is tantalisingly close….

The Happy Planet Index, East meets west by Georgina Martin:

Developed countries like to think they have everything sorted when it comes to quality of living but there are a few ways in which developed countries don’t do so well and in some cases worse than their poorer counter parts, specifically in regard to happiness. Happiness is a complicated thing to measure, much like intelligence and personality there are many variables that encompass happiness, some of which may differ depending on culture, age or creed. The happy planet index (HPI) however, endeavours to measure happiness and create a spectrum of countries from most to least happy. The HPI defines a happy country as: “The extent to which countries deliver long happy, sustainable lives for the people that live in them”….

Robotic Housefly Buzzes to Life by Rachel Feltman:

Flying insects are a pain this time of year, but Harvard researchers couldn’t be happier about the bug buzzing around their lab. A study published in Science today announced the world’s first controlled flight of an insect-size robot, the result of a decade-long project by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard….

Don’t Horse Around With Back Pain at the Kentucky Derby by Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato:

The Kentucky Derby starts at 6:24 p.m. ET on Saturday, but before you place bets on your favorites – Verrazano, Orb, and Revolutionary – make sure your wannabe champion isn’t suffering from chronic back pain. Horses may experience chronic back pain if jockeys aren’t careful riders, according to a study published in The Journal of Experimental Biology. The condition can lead to poor racing times, aggressive behavior, lower selling prices, and dangerous injuries….

By stuartpilbrow (from flickr).

“When Bill Gates walks into a bar… the average salary goes up.” – Popular geeky stats joke.

I once heard a science editor at a rather well-known publication say, in public no less, that she has no idea what p-value* means. This came as a shock to me, a then-relative newcomer to the science communication sphere. Why shock? Because, as I once wrote, statistics “carries the purity of the sciences on its shoulders.” Indeed, as the scientific method is based entirely on statistics, not having a decent grasp of it leaves science reporting prone to serious mishaps.

Of course, I realised fairly quickly that not all science communicators are inept when it comes to statistics. But the countless examples of statistics misinterpretation by the media when reporting scientific findings and discoveries** (looking at you Daily Mail) clearly shows that there is much room for improvement.

An upcoming book, written by members of the Scilance community, may help out in this regard. An excerpt from The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish, and Prosper in the Digital Age, published today exclusively by The Open Notebook, provides science writers with an important primer on statistics.

The excerpt is divided into three sections: “The Uncertainties of Uncertainty,” “Seeing the Story in the Stats” and “A Science Writer’s Statistical Phrasebook.” All three sections are important although I would like to highlight the second and third sections here. These two sections specifically draw attention to and attempt to explain potentially tricky statistical terminologies or concepts like percentage points, confidence intervals, absolute and relative risks and the infamous p-value. Admittedly, it’s all very basic and the explanations are sometimes a bit confusing but the sections do provide a decent base for science communicators to build on.

Up-and-coming science writers should be particularly receptive to statistics in the light of the “big data” era we’re entering. Scientific papers full of data and complex statistical methodologies will become increasingly prevalent and relevant in the near future. Consequently, adequate and critical science journalism will require a good statistics grounding more than ever before.

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* p-value, as the excerpt enticingly explains, is the “likelihood that the observed test result happened by chance. A low p-value means the results were significant and unlikely to have occurred by chance.”

** Science is not the only beat suffering from statistics misinterpretation. Sports, for instance, is currently going through a data revolution leading to a staggering amount of erroneous statistical analyses by sports writers who are casually interchanging correlation with causation.

Let’s do this!

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We’ve done it, people. We have barcoded ants. For science! The research is fabulously cool. Recounted by Kate Prengaman for Ars Technica.

Barcodes let scientists track every ant in a colony

For creatures with very small brains, ants build strikingly complex societies. How a colony of hundreds or thousands of ants maintains order remains poorly understood, but new high tech research methods might be able to shed some light on the complexity of the colony.

A short but very sweet piece by Rose Eveleth for Smithsonian’s Smart News blog about bringing the joy of the sonogram to blind mothers thanks to 3D printing.

For Blind Moms, 3-D Prints of Fetuses Stand in For Sonogram Images

One of the greatest joys of pregnancy for many women is seeing the little blob growing inside on a sonogram—the black and white images of little heads and feet and noses the first of many pictures to make it to Facebook or a privileged place on the fridge. Now, one company is trying to give blind women who miss out on this experience a tactile equivalent, by 3-D printing their fetuses for them.

Looking at a leopard seal’s dentition reveals a whole lot about its diet. Sara Myott, on the blog Green tea and Velociraptors, reveals the stunning ways by which the leopard seal adapted to a diet of small (krill) and large (penguins ):).

Feeding at both ends of the food chain

In terrestrial environments, predator body size is largely correlated with prey body size. The opposite is found for many predators in the marine environment – baleen whales in particular comprise some of the world’s largest mammals and yet they feed on something far smaller (plankton). The leopard seal is unusual in that it feeds both at the top and at the bottom of the food chain, consuming large prey, such as penguins and other seals, and small prey, such as krill, an abundant basal component of the Antarctic food web [...]

When I think of dinosaurs, I see those large fearsome creatures. I don’t think about how their ancestors look like or where they came from. Thankfully Jon Tennant does—and he blogged about it in his EGU blog, Green tea and Velociraptors.

The early evolution of dinosaurs

Dinosaurs. What springs to mind when they’re mentioned? Colossal, towering sauropods? Packs of feisty feathered fiends? Or huge herds of hadrosaurs, chomping their way across the plains of long-lost worlds? Most, including myself, will automatically default to any one of these images when dinosaurs come up in conversation (what, you mean it’s not that frequent for normal people?) But we often neglect to think the earliest dinosaurs, spectacular organisms that gave birth to the most successful, and on-going, terrestrial vertebrate radiation of all time.

Sean Treacy has a very interesting, albeit troubling, article in ScienceNOW about combining antibiotics. This strategy can attack bacteria more effectively although, they can also lead to a rapid explosion of more resistant ones as the natural flora is decimated.

Combining Antiobiotics May Backfire

You might think that combining two antibiotics would be a great strategy to take down a nasty disease fast. Think again. A new study suggests that such a two-pronged attack can backfire badly by giving super-resistant bacteria the opportunity they need to come out on top in the struggle for resources.

An important piece by Neurobonkers who postulates that because of the filter bubble, the need to debunk pseudoscience in all online avenues (including your friend’s unwise Facebook status) is now even more important.

Achieving herd immunity against pseudoscience in the age of the filter bubble and the social news revolution

Last night Ben Goldacre appeared on BBC Newsnight (viewable from UK ip addesses or portals only, for the next 7 days) discussing the ongoing havoc caused by the MMR scare in the form of a major outbreak in the UK of a disease that was on its way to being eradicated. Ben Goldacre once again described the intriguing fact that anti-vaccine fears are traditionally (thankfully) localised within local and cultural boundaries.

More good stuff:

• Should those with a vested interest comment on minimum alcohol pricing? by Suzi Gage on her Guardian blog Sifting the Evidence
• Your Brain’s a Search-and-Rescue Machine by Rachel Nuwer on the Smithsonian blog Smart News
• Microraptor: A 4-Winged, Fish-Eating Dinosaur by Nadia Drake for Wired
• Mineral Monday: Bismuth By Request by Mary Beth Griggs on her blog The Rock Knows
• Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors for Mesopredators? by Anne-Marie Hodge on her SciLogs.com blog Endless Forms
• My Grandfather Is In A Sugar-Apple by Khalil A. Cassimally (me!) on his Scitable blog Labcoat Life
• Dental records: A new study explains why whales have such unusual teeth by Kate Baggaley in Scienceline
• One of the Herd by Tanie Browne on her SciLogs.com blog Epilogue
• Completed genome of platyfish may give clues to deadly skin (and scale?) cancer by Rebecca Burton on her blog Layman’s Terms Media
• Suicidal thoughts by Laura Geggel for SFARI
• A Moment in the Sun for Biomimicry by Whitney Campbell on her Scitable blog Green Screen
• Concern, confusion over next stage of reform by Jodi Murphy for Georgia Health News
• Smartphone Satellites to Launch a Space App Race by Rachel Feltman for Popular Mechanics
• On the cutting block: Raw-milk cheese: deadly, nutritious, or just delicious? by William Herkewitz for Scienceline
• Social entrepreneurs in India: Water for all by Akshat Rathi for The Economist.

It was the late 1700’s and John Dalton, now well known for his achievements in atomic theory, was walking by a store when he noticed a pair of stockings displayed with the sign “Silk, and newest fashion.” He decided to buy a pair for his mother and chose what he thought was dark, dull blue but to his surprise his mother, on receiving the hose, exclaimed: “They’re as red as cherry, John!”…

What Mushroom Clouds Can Reveal About The Waco Explosion by Kyle Hill:

On Wednesday night a fertilizer plant north of Waco, Texas, caught fire and exploded. The violent rupture shook the earth for miles around (the explosion was picked up by seismographs in Oklahoma), set fire to the surroundings, and collapsed nearby buildings….

How stores trick our senses to make us buy more (Part 3 of 5: Touch) by Jordan Gaines:

There are few things more satisfying than running your hand over a rack full of cashmere sweaters, right? My dad teases my mom and I when we’re out shopping, asking why we must touch and comment on every garment’s texture within arm’s reach. I mean, it just feels good. And many a Christmas has passed where my mom has received an especially fluffy sweater from yours truly, her partner in petting. Sure, a company can do its job to create an attractive, pleasurable product for us consumers. But—you guessed it—the store does its own part in tricking us, ensuring that the phrase “you touch it, you buy it” often holds true….

How the Iran Earthquake Could Have Been Much Worse by Rachel Feltman:

Tuesday morning saw Iran’s second major earthquake in a week, which measured at 7.8 But this time—despite expert speculation that hundreds had died, and an early reported death toll of 40—no one was killed on Iran’s side of the border. At least 13 (update: sources now say 34) people were killed in neighboring Pakistan, but the final death toll is currently uncertain. In any case, it seems to be much lower than those early reports suggested. How did the region escapes the worst this time? …

Nano-Suit Protects Bugs From Space-Like Vacuums by Sean Treacy:

Put a fruit fly larva in a spacelike vacuum, and the results aren’t pretty. Within a matter of minutes, the animal will collapse into a crinkled, lifeless husk. Now, researchers have found a way to protect the bugs: Bombard them with electrons, which form a “nano-suit” around their bodies. The advance could help scientists take high-resolution photographs of tiny living organisms. It also suggests a new way that creatures could survive the harsh conditions of outer space and may even lead to new space travel technology for humans….

#sci4hels Question Time #3 – Ladybiz Edition by Rose Eveleth:

So, you might have noticed a few things about the #sci4hels crew. We’re early career, we like gifs, we cover a broad array of subject areas and media, and we’re all ladies….

No Business Like Snow Business by Tania Browne:

In March, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine hosted a birthday party with a difference. The Birthday Boy couldn’t make it as he was 200 years old, but he’s the closest thing epidemiologists have to a folk hero. His name was John Snow, and he was the first person to figure out that mapping disease outbreaks might give us useful clues about where they start, and what we can do to stop them….

Constant Gardeners: Primates Shape African Forest Structure by Anne-Marie Hodge:

Charismatic animals are capable of stirring up strong emotional responses amongst the general public, and (hopefully) inspire people to take wildlife conservation seriously. These are your pandas, your tigers, your elephants, your gorillas, your baby seals—the “cover girls” of conservation. Fundraisers often laud these animals as “flagship species,” while advocates for less photogenic organisms lament that they distract people from more ecologically-based conservation issues. For example, far less media attention is granted to less glamorous organisms and processes that are critical for ecosystem integrity, despite being less ideal for glossy magazines and brochures….

Coming to Your Neighborhood: Giant Animal Invaders by Nadia Drake:

Animal invaders can arrive by land, sea, or air. While most invasive species are unwelcome for one reason or another, some invaders up the creep factor simply by being giant versions of familiar animals. Just this week a horde of really, really big snails made the news by slowly taking over Florida. Here are some other awesomely oversize species that have infiltrated regions around the globe (but mostly in Florida)….

Easier, less invasive STD test may be an overlooked winner by Rachel Feltman:

The pap smear, a test meant to detect precancerous cells in the cervix, is an uncomfortable rite of passage for most modern woman. But now it’s become apparent that sexually active women only need a pap smear once every two years, or even three. This poses a problem for those not in monogamous relationships — for many women, STD testing and pap smears have become linked, since clinicians seem to have a “well, I’m already in there” mentality when it comes to collecting endocervical samples….

Running for Alzheimer’s by Christina Clark:

It was about mile 7 as I recollect. Only 5 more to go. My legs were giving way, my vision was becoming blurred and I was mentally hitting the wall. I was determined to get to the finish line. Why am I doing this? I thought to myself. Halfway through my full-time masters and after a very long week at the hospital I suddenly started to feel maybe I’d taken on a bit more than I could chew. I turned up the volume on my earphones and kept running….

The mystery of music – waxing lyrical on the language of emotion by Dan Stuart:

Music: noun. The art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds to produce beauty of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, expressive content, etc.; musical composition, performance, analysis, etc., as a subject of study; the occupation or profession of musicians….

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Everything changed on November 10, 2010. It was a chilly Wednesday in New York City, but I was cozily settled in front of a mac desktop in my thesis mentor’s lab at Columbia University Medical Center. I was looking over some data, while g-chatting with a friend when she suddenly asked:

12:49 PM Friend: what do you want to be when you grow up;)

12:50 PM me: A writer

/bartender

/town drunk

/fortune teller

12:51 PM Friend: i like writer the best:)

ohhh but fortune teller would be fun too!

But in all seriousness, if you want to write, then write.

Although cloaked in jest, this exchange triggered my switch from basic research to a career in science writing. I had been mulling the idea for a year, but after reaching this tipping point, I sat down and planned my exodus from the bench.

Many writers argue that journalism school is the most direct route. UC Santa Cruz has a great program that is tailored for former scientists. What’s that you say? You’d rather pour a beehive down your trousers than go to school again after you’ve completed your doctorate?

Full disclosure: breaking into the writing/freelancing isn’t easy, and at times, can be a frustrating catch-22. Editors prefer writers with a portfolio, but the only way to build a portfolio is by publishing pieces. Writing programs are worth consideration, as they can equip person with a collection of writing samples and a professional network for finding future employment.

I took a slightly different tact to enter the field, and here’s how that went.

Keep calm and pick your audience

Most established writers echo my friend’s last comment and say that the first step is simple: “just sit down and write”. Blogging is the obvious medium, but getting started can trigger certain anxieties.

Will people read it? Will they think that I’m an idiot?

To allay these fears, I consistently turn to a line from Colin Norman in A Field Guide for Science Writers (an invaluable aid to young science writers): “don’t be intimidated by your readers”.

It’s an easy trap to want to please everyone, but this shouldn’t be a main objective. I would argue that your first task should be to visualize your audience.

To borrow another quote from Norman: “Remember who your readers are… a good story for a professional magazine is one that plays to that community’s particular interests”. He was referring to news pieces for trade and science journals, but it is a rule that applies generally. When I first started blogging, I would sit down in front on my laptop and picture my days as an undergrad at Bard College—a liberal arts institution, emphasis on the “arts”—where I would periodically attempt to entertain my humanities-centric friends with random anecdotes about biology. This is the audience I blogged for.

Picturing your audience is important for two reasons. First, it provides a natural context for telling the story, which can give the piece “a voice” and personality. Second, if you venture into freelancing, it can help you decide where to pitch your stories, as each media outlet has a target market: for The Scientist, it’s life science professionals; for Medical Daily, my new employer and a subsidiary of the International Business Times, it’s a general audience in search of expert commentary on health news and policy. Whether you’re trying to reach a “group of artisans” or “young scientists at a journal club meeting”, visualizing your audience is key.

Y U No Share?

Sharing your stories in a public forum can be daunting, especially in the age of Internet trolls, so start on a small scale. Tell a few classmates or share your writing with friends on Facebook (“Likes” and especially “Shares” are a great form of feedback). Friends are often the best critics because they can be delicate but honest.

After you’ve written a couple of posts, you can try to reach a wider audience by sharing your posts on a blog aggregator like ScienceSeeker or ResearchBlogging.com. To measure how well your posts are doing, I recommend using Google Analytics to track metrics—e.g. how long people spend on each post or which posts are the most popular.

Science Writing: all or nothing…or in between

I am periodically approached by graduate students and post-docs who are interested in writing, but “afraid of the time commitment” or “of switching occupations”. My response was recently encapsulated in a recent blogpost from Chad Orzel, a science writer and physics professor, entitled “Blogging Doesn’t Have to Be a Career”.

“[Science blogging] can absolutely be done on an intermittent hobby basis. If it turns out to be something you really like doing, then it can open doors to other sorts of careers and activities, but there’s nothing forcing you to go through any of those doors if you don’t want to.”

The Internet is populated by a spectrum of scientists who blog. Chad, Vincent Racaniello, Puneet Opal and “Dr. Becca” are professors who also moonlight as wonderful science communicators. Connor Bamford (@cggbamford) and Jason Goldman (@jgold85) are PhD students who rank amongst my favorite sources for all things related to infectious disease and neuroscience, respectively.

And Jeanne Garbarino from Rockefeller University was*, without question, my favorite example of post-doctoral researcher who is a science writer…and an editor for Double X Science, a contributor to HuffPo, and a mom..

Garbarino also co-organizes a monthly science discussion series in Manhattan, called SpotOnNYC, and this last resume item opens a perfect segue into my next point.  Chatting with current science writers is a great way to ‘measure the waters’ and assess different career options in the field. SpotOnNYC is perfect in this regard. Editors, writers, historians, and publishers from NYC’s major media outlets rub elbows with graduate students and professors from city’s numerous universities. The result is science conversations that are rich and informative. (They are also available by web stream/video.)

*Rockefeller recently made Garbarino their Director of Science Outreach.

The final leap: pitching and professional writing

Promoting science via blogging is fun on its own, but you might want to eventually use these skills to pay the bills (#rhymeintended) Here’s how I capitalized on my blog.

First, I ‘backdoored’ my way into the profession by working as a public information officer for Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity (CII). Academic departments/press offices are often rife with job opportunities—I can think of 2-3 departments at Columbia Medical Center that have hired or considered hiring former students within the last year—and can be a great home for a new scientist-turned-writer. For instance, the CII releases a constant stream of high impact studies on emerging infectious diseases, so I was regularly composing press releases and liaising with reporters at mainstream news outlets. This was valuable experience taught me how to pitch stories to journalists, a skill that I later repurposed for freelancing.

To break into freelancing, you will need to learn how to pitch/sell a story to a publication.

The Open Notebook is great a resource for learning the ropes. They have a pitch database with tips and sample pitches from established writers. Publications like Science and The Scientist supply guidelines on how to pitch to them. The SA Incubator is also populating such a database which also includes editors’ contact info, paying rates and more. The database is open and public so do consider contributing to it.

Mediabistro has a “pitch tips” section that is curated by editors from a huge range of publications, which is where I learned how to pitch to Scientific American. The site also has a great jobs forum, which is where I found my post with Medical Daily. There is a fee ($55/year) for the pitch guides, but the job listings are free.

Finally, if you’re enrolled in a science program, I highly recommend that you become a student member of the National Association of Science Writers ($35). The NASW is a treasure trove of information on how to become a professional writer. They also have a great jobs forum and a list of writing fellowships.

Feel free to shoot a tweet at me if you have any questions. Happy writing!

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Correction: The post initially mentioned that Jeanne Garbarino is an editor for Slate‘s DoubleX. This is incorrect; Garbarino is an editor for Double X Science.

Voooooom in…

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In awesome this week, blogger Aatish Bhatia looks at solar-powered planes. (As a rule, try to read Aatish’s every blog post.)

Solar planes are cool, but they’re not the future of flight

Have you heard of the Solar Impulse? It’s a Swiss aircraft that’s powered entirely by solar energy. The ambitious goal of this project is to fly around the world using only solar power. On May 1, they’ll begin a trip from San Francisco to New York City, with multiple stops along the way. They’ve already pulled off a 26 hour flight, as well as an inter-continental journey from Spain to Morocco, powered only by sunshine. (They use battery packs to store the spare energy and power the plane at night.)

Dan Gareau at Rockefeller’s The Incubator explains optics, light and photons with monkey butts. Also makes for the perfect title, really.

Getting Cheeky with Photons: The Optics of Blue Monkey Butts

If you’re anything like me, you may have wondered why some monkeys have bright blue skin. Even if you don’t pay careful attention to monkey butts, you may still have wondered what makes some people’s eyes blue. To answer these questions, it is important to first understand how light interacts with living stuff, which we call biological tissue [...]

Arielle Duhaime-Ross has a really good piece at Quartz about sperm cryopreservation or relative lack thereof. As it turns out, sperm cryopreservation makes much sense both in terms of practicality and economics.

Enough urging women to freeze their eggs—men should freeze their sperm, too

“Women, consider freezing your eggs,” blared a recent headline on CNN’s website. In the piece, Yale anthropology professor Maria C. Inhorn advises women that freezing their eggs before they turn 30 will enable them to eventually “rewind the biological clock,” giving them more room to choose when they have children, instead of feeling forced to give birth before the inevitable fertility decline. Those are all valid arguments, but if you agree with Inhorn, then you shouldn’t limit yourself to solely advocating for egg cryopreservation (freezing)—you should be telling men to freeze their sperm, too.

Transparent brains! Awesome, am I right or am I right? They also allow scientists to visualise our neural networks in 3D explains Helen Shen in Nature.

See-through brains clarify connections

A chemical treatment that turns whole organs transparent offers a big boost to the field of ‘connectomics’ — the push to map the brain’s fiendishly complicated wiring. Scientists could use the technique to view large networks of neurons with unprecedented ease and accuracy. The technology also opens up new research avenues for old brains that were saved from patients and healthy donors.

Kyle Hill on the snake which turns your blood into jello. Comes with a video and everything.

The Snake Bite That Turns You Into A Jello Mold

The Russell’s Viper is one of the deadliest snakes in all of Asia because it can give your blood the consistency of ketchup [...] just a drop of Russel’s viper venom (RVV) can turn a whole cup of blood into Jello. If you get bit, you won’t exactly have this paste running through your veins, but the process can definitely kill you.

Markus Hammonds’s echoes my own thoughts in the first paragraph of his piece for Australian Science about a schoolchild who discovered a new jellyfish species. You won’t be surprised that the jellyfish has been found in Australia.

The Schoolchild who Discovered a New Jellyfish Species

The thing I love the most about scientific discovery is that anyone can do it. Literally anyone could, tomorrow, turn over a stone or look at a seemingly empty spot in the night sky and find something which no human being has ever seen before. Or, perhaps more importantly, something which no one has full appreciated before.

A few more:

• #Sci4hels: The Killer (Female) Science Journalists of the Future by Erin Podolak.

• The Oldest, Loneliest Supernova by Mark Zastrow for Sky & Telescope.

• Use of GM cotton linked to rise in aphid numbers by Richa Malhotra for SciDev.net.

• ScienceOnlineTeen! by Samantha Jakuboski on her Scitable blog.

• Can fossil mammals help us with our conservation efforts? by Jon Tennant.

• Creation: Q&A with Adam Rutherford by Pete Etchells.

• What Artists and Scientists have in Common by Paige Brown.

Today we introduce you to Shannon Palus (Twitter)

Hello, welcome to The SA Incubator. Let’s start from the beginning: where are you originally from?

Philadelphia is my home base, though I lived some places before that. I currently live in Montreal, where I study physics at McGill University. I’m not here for too much longer, though. I am just about to “hatch!”

How did you get into science and how did you get into writing? And how did these two trajectories fuse into becoming a science writer?

One afternoon, when I was learning about equations and variables in school — just your very basic pre-pre-algebra at age 11 or something — I was standing in the kitchen with my dad, and he threw me an orange. He said something along the lines of, “you could write an equation that would describe that orange’s motion.” That was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. That, and heavy doses of Richard Feynman from our family bookshelf, led me to pursue an undergraduate degree in physics. I wanted to study physics specifically so I could better understand the things I was reading about, the things that seemed really magical about the world. My family is a science family. When I was growing up, we had a rock tumbler, and a telescope, and subscribed to many of the publications that I would now kill to work for. That I would study science felt inevitable.

As for the writing part – I was pretty terrible at writing, for the longest time. In 11th grade we had a unit on creative writing, and I realized that writing could be so many things beyond a 5 paragraph essay. I wrote this thing that was really fluffy, and a little off the wall, about math class. I sat at my desk writing, and re-writing, and re-writing, in a really deep trance. It was an amazing feeling. It was like I caught some kind of brain infection, and I started doing all kinds of weird things like keeping a journal and writing fiction. I have enormous word files on my computer full of things that maybe no one else should ever see.

Science writing then became a logical extension of these two things that I was deeply into. I wound up at unversity pretty much knowing exactly what I wanted to do with my time: study physics and write for the school newspaper. I spent five years doing both of those things — extending my degree to make time for both. I picked up a minor in anthropology along the way, too, which made the whole thing balance out very nicely.

What professional experience have you had so far—publications, internships, jobs? Feel free to include a bunch of links here! What is your current job?

Photo: Victor Tangermann

I started writing for the McGill Daily — the only student-run paper with a Sci+Tech section at the time — my very first month at school. I picked up a story assignment — about nanotechnology and cancer — and spent a few minutes talking to the editor who explained I needed to interview some people. I sat in my dorm room pacing around and pinching myself until I worked up the courage to cold-call scientists and ask them questions about their work. I was 18 years old and the stuffed animal I had elected to take to college with me was sitting on the bed staring at me, propped up on the dorm-room bed two feet away from the itsy bitsy dorm room desk, and I was quite nervous.

But no one laughed me off the phone or called me an idiot or asked me how old I was, or was able to see Tiger through the phone line, or whatever other fears I had about interviewing. I handed in the story.

The editor called me later that afternoon to inform me that I hadn’t included any quotes.

My response (paraphrased): Mmm. Quotes?

I’ve improved a little since. I wrote a column for a year. I wrote blurbs about campus events, and I wrote features, and I wrote about Mars, and I made excuses to interview writers and educators I admired. I was elected editor of the Science+Technology section. The Daily newsroom became my home.

During my third November of university, sitting in a Second Cup on Ste-Catherine bored and stressed out by my math homework, I applied to an internship at Discover. For some reason, I was accepted, and so I emailed my academic adviser to inform him that I was going to play hooky for a semester, found an apartment on Craigslist, and took off for New York. Those were the coolest, weirdest four months of my life thus far. I remember being on the phone with astrophysicist Kip Thorne for a story, while sitting in a coffee shop in the East Village — a very, “wow, how did I get here,” moment. There were lots of those.

Currently, I am an editor at the McGill Science Undergraduate Research Journal, where I founded the journal’s blog. In the way of paid labor, I freelance edit and fact-check. I write now and then for a few places (but just a little — pitching and going to school is challenging).

One thing that I’ve started doing in the past year is writing about my experiences with casual misogyny in the physics department (which, for the record, is probably no worse at McGill than anywhere else), just kind of saying things about my experience and discussing the concept of the chilly climate and whatnot. That’s earned me a tiny bit of a reputation. I’ve learned why its not a good idea to read the comments sections on articles (though I still do it). Being a feminist isn’t a job, but it is the kind of thing that can make you really appreciate the concept of happy hour.

Do you write a personal or science blog ? How much do you use social media networks, e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr, Pinterest, Flickr, YouTube etc., to promote your own and your friends’ work, to learn and to connect?

I use Twitter constantly, to the effect of finding out interesting things and talking to people and making inside jokes. That’s probably a terrible “brand” strategy. I used to have a personal Tumblr, but it was very TMI and I didn’t like that. I find that I use Facebook and G-chat (and increasingly, Google Plus) mostly to maintain ties with people — hang out with folks I’ve met at conferences, or keep up with people from high school. I have a constant Facebook message going with several good friends, and with people I have met at conferences, like ScienceOnline2013. Honestly, that’s why I find social networking really valuable, strengthening medium and strong ties, and always having people to bounce ideas off of, and share experiences with. Or just complain to, etc.

I hate promoting my own work, which I know is a problem. I try to do it. But I do not like doing it.

Personal science blog TK soon, I hope! Between freelance gigs and schoolwork, I am a little drained. That is going to change soon, though…

What are your plans for the future?

Unclear!

I am graduating this spring and right now my plans are very specific (in that I know exactly what I want to do — science writing) and at the same time very up in the air in that I don’t know how I am going to do it (in a way that could pay rent, I mean). I am pretty set on not going to any kind of specialized program, at least for the moment, mostly because of the cost.

I would love to find a great paid internship — or a job (!) — and until that happens I am just going to hang out and freelance and write even more cover letters and try not to irk my new roommates (aka parents) too too much. (Do you need a keen intern or freelancer? Contact me).

It is safe to say that I’m going to be writing, whether I find people to pay me to do that or not.

Thank you!

====================

Previously in this series:

Kristina Ashley Bjoran

Emily Eggleston

Erin Podolak

Rachel Nuwer

Hannah Krakauer

Rose Eveleth

Nadia Drake

Kelly Izlar

Jack Scanlan

Francie Diep

Maggie Pingolt

Jessica Gross

Abby McBride

Natalie Wolchover

Jordan Gaines

Audrey Quinn

Douglas Main

Smitha Mundasad

Mary Beth Griggs

Shara Yurkiewicz

Casey Rentz

Akshat Rathi

Kathleen Raven

Penny Sarchet

Amy Shira Teitel

Victoria Charlton

Noby Leong and Tristan O’Brien

Taylor Kubota

Benjamin Plackett

Laura Geggel

Daisy Yuhas

Miriam Kramer

Ashley Taylor

Kate Yandell

Justine Hausheer

Aatish Bhatia

Ashley Tucker

Jessica Men

Kelly Oakes

Lauren Fuge

Catherine Owsik

Marissa Fessenden

Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato

Kelly Poe

Kate Shaw

Meghan Rosen

Jon Tennant

Ashley Braun

Suzi Gage

Michael Grisafe

Jonathan Chang

Alison Schumacher

Alyssa Botelho

Hillary Craddock

Susan Matthews

Lacey Avery

Ilana Yurkiewicz

Kate Prengaman

Nicholas St. Fleur

Dani Grodsky

Cristy Gelling

Sprinkled with pollen, buzzing bees fly from one blossom to another, collecting sweet nectar from brilliantly colored flowers. Bees tend to symbolize the pollination process, but there are many wild insects that carry out the same function. Unfortunately, wild insect populations are in decline, and, according to a recent study, adding more honey bees may not be a viable solution…

By building “fairy circles,” termites engineer their own ecosystem by Kate Shaw:

The Namib Desert is dotted with thousands of mysterious “fairy circles,” which are near-perfect circles of barren soil two to fifteen meters wide, rimmed by tall grass. They are unmistakable and stretch for miles, giving the landscape an ethereal and otherworldly feel. Many possible explanations have been proposed, including toxic substances in the soil, meteorites, termites, UFOs, and the ghosts of dead natives. But the circles are extremely remote—more than 110 miles from the nearest village—and have been difficult to study scientifically. Despite decades of research, the cause of these bizarre circles has remained elusive….

Stranded Sea Lion Pups Arrive in Northern California by Nadia Drake:

Malnourished sea lion pups have started arriving in Northern California – by the vanload. It’s a three-day, two-night trip for the weary mammalian travelers, with overnight stops in San Luis Obispo and Moss Landing. At the end of the road: The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, where the pups will be cared for and returned to health…

Mollusk medicine: Cone snail bacteria may yield new opportunities for drug development by Katie Hiler:

Subic Bay lies on the western coast of the Philippine island of Luzon and sweeps westward in a brushstroke of aquamarine until it blends into the South China Sea. The region is home to as many as 122 species, including the Philippine gecko and the endangered Luzon forest frog. Fifty feet beneath the glassy surface, one of the bay’s humbler marine inhabitants inches imperceptibly across the sandy bottom….

Microbes Buried Deep in Ocean Crust May Form World’s Largest Ecosystem by Hannah Waters:

If you were to hit the seafloor and continue to travel down, you’d run into an ecosystem unlike any other on earth. Beneath several hundred meters of seafloor sediment is the Earth’s crust: thick layers of lava rock running with cracks that cover around 70% of the planet’s surface. Seawater flows through the cracks, and this system of rock-bound rivulets is enormous: it’s the largest aquifer on earth, containing 4% of global ocean volume, says Mark Lever, an ecologist who studies anaerobic (no-oxygen) carbon cycling at Aarhus University in Denmark…..

Driverless cars will make your city vast and boring by Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

If driverless cars have taught us anything, it’s that we are all very bad drivers. In a world of robocars, scientists predict that driving will be a much safer and more efficient way of getting around due to a dramatic reduction in traffic jams, Sunday drivers and road rage. But more than how we get around, driverless cars will change the way our cities are built….

What the heck is the polymerase chain reaction? by Andrew P. Han:

In a world without PCR, there would be no Human Genome Project. No genetic tests for disease, paternity, or crime-scene DNA. No way to tell whether the sushi you got for lunch is actually tuna. This cornerstone of modern biology copies a twisted, double-strand of DNA over and over until there is enough to sequence and analyze….

Taking shots in the dark: Coyote populations continue to grow, despite being a popular hunting target by Nick Stockton:

The best time to hunt coyotes is at between dusk and dawn. Once you scout a good spot you try to lure the beasts in, using hand held instruments to mimic the calls of different woodland animals. Maybe you choose to be a distressed rabbit, which sounds like a squealing baby. If that doesn’t work, you can yelp like a turkey or cackle like a Pileated woodpecker. On top of your head is a dim red light to help you spot movement. If you’re lucky, a pair of eyes shines back. After turning on the high powered beam attached to your rifle, you have a few seconds to determine what type of predator you’re looking at before you take your shot….

DNA Detectives, Mongoose Edition by Anne-Marie Hodge:

In case you’re wondering why this blog has been a bit quiet, I am currently in Kenya conducting the first data collection session of my PhD. My research focuses on the effects of rainfall on mesopredator release responses, and so far things are going very well. The majority of what I’m doing right now is live-trapping mesopredators—in this case the cast of characters includes genets, several species of mongoose (dwarf, slender, and white-tailed), and black-backed jackals. For a discussion of what exactly a mesopredator is, see this post from my series of field updates on the Scientific American ‘Expeditions’ blog….

Booting up idea to soothe horse legs by Claire O’Connell:

You could say it was horse sense. Four years ago, Louisa Williams was watching a horse trying to get some relief from sore legs, and she hit on the idea of massaging those aching equine limbs. Four years later, the idea has developed into a massaging and cooling “boot” that is sold around the world. …

How to Count Komodo Dragons by Douglas Main:

Camera traps worked about as well as physical traps at detecting the presence of Komodo dragons―and, in certain areas, did even better, an analysis reveals. The finding is significant because Komodo populations are threatened by human activities…

Adult advancement by Laura Geggel:

The bulk of autism research has focused on children, and studies of adults with the condition are scarce. A new perspective published in February’s World Psychiatry suggests that adults with autism fare better now than they did in the 1960s, when research into older age groups began….

Head-Bobbing Sea Lion May Keep the Beat Better Than You by Nadia Drake:

A sea lion trained to bob her head in time to music not only appears to have better rhythm than many people, but she is also challenging researchers’ notions about beat-keeping in animals. Previously, the only non-human animals shown to keep a beat were birds with exceptional vocal mimicry skills, such as Snowball, the dancing cockatoo. As a result, scientists had suggested that learning such skills required a talent for vocal mimicry….

Why you hate the sound of your own voice by Jordan Gaines:

I love home movies. I was lucky to grow up during the years where parents lugged gigantic, boxy camcorders over their shoulders to document our first toddles and words, and I recently reveled in watching myself grow up when my mom transferred all our old tapes to DVD…

Robot jellyfish to be environmental watchdog by Rebecca Burton:

While jellyfish aren’t a beach goer’s favorite sea creature, these blob-like organisms–or at least robotic prototypes designed to look and move just like them– could be used to patrol the ocean, looking for signs of environmental despair in the near future…

If Your Plane is Going Down, It’s Better to Sit in the Back by Rose Eveleth:

The set-up included a Boeing 727, 38 specialized cameras, over $500,000 worth of crash test dummies, a crew of pilots who bailed out of the plane with parachutes before the crash, and a simple question: where’s the safest place in the plane?…

As White House Embraces BRAIN Initiative, Questions Linger by Emily Underwood:

For neuroscientist Rafael Yuste, sitting in an ornate White House chamber yesterday listening to President Barack Obama heap praise—and some $100 million—on a brain-mapping initiative that he helped hatch was a “luminous” experience. “It felt like history,” says the researcher, who works at Columbia University. …

Mayors group focuses gun debate on domestic violence, background checks by Kelly Poe:

Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a national campaign for tighter gun regulations, is highlighting the connection between guns and domestic violence with a new television advertisement and a series of events in about a dozen communities across the country Wednesday, including Cary…

One of Napoleon’s Generals Was More Interested in Gathering Beetles Than Fighting at Waterloo by Rachel Nuwer:

Count Pierre François Marie Auguste Dejean was a peculiar fellow. Born in 1780 just north of Paris, by the time the young Frenchman turned 13 he already displayed a conspicuous interest in insects. He started with butterflies and moths but soon matured into a love for all things beetle. At the age of 15, he decided to devote his life to collecting and studying these insects. But that plan was interrupted. Dejean enrolled in Napoleon’s army…

Did We Just Find Dark Matter? by Colin Schultz:

The first results are in from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a super-expensive detector that is currently hurtling overhead at a brisk 17,500 miles per hour from its perch aboard the International Space Station. That detector, designed to measure high-energy particles such as cosmic rays and the antimatter particle positrons, was designed to finally pin down the elusive dark matter….

New Giant Tarantula Discovered in Sri Lanka by Nadia Drake:

A new type of tarantula about the size of your face has been found in northern Sri Lanka. Scientists found the spiders — with a leg span up to 8 inches across — living in trees and the old doctor’s quarters of a hospital in Mankulam….

Riddles in the Dark by Maryam Zaringhalam:

To the obligate land-dweller, life underwater is just about as foreign as life on other planets. Hidden from our land-centric consciousness, the average human seldom considers our aquatic counterparts, even though they frequently end up on our dinner plates. Out of sight. Out of mind. And yet, all modern life—aquatic and land-dwelling—was born from water. We share a common unicellular ancestor that serendipitously emerged in the water 3.5 billion years ago. So in the grand scheme of things, these aquatic aliens are actually more like our long-lost cousins….

The resistible rise of Hal -9000 by Oluwalogbon Akinnola:

If you’re reading this then you are one of countless consumers of the many fruits of the efforts of scientists and engineers. Technology permeates almost every part of our life, and as it continues to develop at ever increasing speeds its reach spreads further and further. In our generation alone we’ve seen activities such as finding your way in a new city, researching your coursework and watching a film transform from isolated, focus-intensive past times to things we do on the fly. This of course raises many poignant questions such as “Are we eroding away our concentration spans and impeding the development of key skills such as map-reading?” However, one question is especially pertinent for me and no doubt numerous other sci-fi fans: How long do we have before our iPads become our iMasters? …

So far, Operation Database of the Future lists 12 publications, including ScienceNow, Nature’s Scitable, Scientific American’s Guest blog, Los Angeles Times and BBC Focus Magazine.

Advice is typically to-the-point and insightful. For example, here is what upcoming science writer Beth Skwarecki recommends to upcoming writers interested in writing for ScienceNow:

“[...] The morning the piece goes live, you’ll have to be by your computer and ready for a couple rounds of edits. Fast paced but fun. SNOWs require an interview with a researcher and 1-2 comments. [Shorts] don’t require interviews. Art is key (but they can get stock photo if necessary).”

Adam Smith, now a full-time reporter, stresses on the importance of finding an appropriate hook when pitching to BBC Focus Magazine:

“Science, tech, future. You need a very timely hook, a poppy top line and a good reason why they should commission you and not just publish another article that conveniently cross-promotes other BBC output. Space, geology, dinos are particularly popular. ”

If you have contributed to other outlets, consider adding some information in the Google Sheet. And make sure you sift through the advice listed to maximise chances of your pitch getting accepted.

====================

Publications currently listed in Operation Database of the Future:

1. Scitable, Nature Education, NPG
2. Chemistry World, Royal Society of Chemistry
3. Significance, Royal Statistical Society
4. Scientific American’s Guest Blog
5. Los Angeles Times
6. New Humanist
7. The Register
8. BBC Focus magazine
9. Pod Academy
10. British Medical Journal
11. Bionews
12. Science Magazine: ScienceNow and ScienceInsider

Just a few days before that, as a part of our regular Question Time in preparation for our panel at WCSJ2013 in Helsinki, we tackled the same question:

What does a new science journalist do to get noticed? How do you get people to read your work, give you assignments, follow you on Twitter, and generally just know who you are?

Rose Eveleth collected and organized the responses we received on Twitter (using hashtag #sci4hels), but here I’d like to provide, all in one place, a bunch of links to resources, other people’s thoughts about it, and a few brief thoughts of my own.

Ways of becoming a science writer

There are two basic trajectories: one more traditional, which I like to call “vertical”, and the other one I call “horizontal” which, though it happened with individual writers for a long time, seems to be a much more frequent, if not dominant trajectory these days.

The vertical trajectory is the one taken by people who, perhaps from a very early age, knew they wanted to become writers or journalists, perhaps specifically science journalists. They major in journalism in college (perhaps double-major in a science as well), work on their school paper, start internships early in their local papers (or radio or TV stations), then go to a Master’s program in science journalism. By the time they graduate from that, they already have lots of experience, several internships, many clips, perhaps some local awards, and are ready to start making a living as staff writers or freelancers.

The horizontal trajectory describes people who start out in science, with every intention of making a career in research. But, as tenure track is now an alternative career in science, most science students need to find other options. Some of them – those who always liked to write, wrote diaries as kids, etc. – will explore the option of becoming science writers. The most direct horizontal trajectory involves starting a science blog while still doing research, becoming known for good writing there, then start pitching stories for online (and later print) magazines, and gradually leaving the lab bench and starting to make a living by writing alone. Brian Switek, John Timmer and Ed Yong are probably the best known examples of people who took this path. Heck, I am one of those examples, too. Many more are somewhere along that trajectory right now.

Of course, those are extremes, too neatly cut apart. Many people will do something in the middle, combining the two approaches in some way. For example, they may pursue a career in research while also taking summer internships at science magazines, or editing the science section of the college newspaper. Some may major in science, then go to j-school for Masters. Also, not all of the new entries into science writing are young. Sure, some make the switch after college or Masters in science, but others make the switch later, after getting a PhD, or finishing a postdoc, or after years of teaching as adjunct faculty with no hope of ever getting a tenure track position, or even after many years as full faculty, once grant money dries out and there are no more resources to keep running the lab.

Either way, there comes a time when one becomes a professional science writer/journalist and has to make a living that way. What does one need to do to succeed?

Understanding the new media ecosystem

It is important to be aware that 20th century media ecosystem is a very unusual aberration in the way people communicated throughout history. Means of production were expensive. Very few people could afford to own printing presses, radio and TV studios, etc. Running all that complicated equipment required technical expertise and professional training. Thus media became locked up in silos, hierarchical, broadcast-only with little-to-none (and then again centrally controlled) means for feedback. There was a wealthy, vocal minority that determined what was news, and how to frame it, and the vast majority was consuming the news in silence.

Today, all one needs is some source of electricity (e.g., a small battery in your smartphone) and some means of accessing the Internet. The act of publishing is reduced to clicking on the “Publish” button. Yes, this still leaves some people out of the media, especially in the developing countries, but compared to just twenty years ago, vastly larger numbers of people now have access to the means of production of news. The obstacles to access – money, technical skills for running the machinery – are now much, much lower, almost free.

This turns everything on its head! Silos are breaking down, economics of media are severely disrupted, former gatekeepers are squealing in distress, old hierarchies are broken down (and replaced by new hierarchies), and now everyone has to learn new “media hygiene” practices: who to trust, how to filter the information, how to organize it for one’s self. The new ecosystem now contains both the traditional outlets and the individuals, “people formerly known as the audience“, as equal players.

There is only so much time and energy anyone can invest into consumption of the media. In the flood of information coming out every second, how does one get science to the audience? Specialized science media outlets cannot see each other as competition any more – they are now collaborators, helping each other toward the same goal: trying to, at least occasionally, displace trivia, Hollywood gossip, and dangerous pseudoscience with good science news. Individual science writers, as equal participants in the media ecosystem, should do the same: replace the notion of competition with the idea of cooperation.

How does a new science writer succeed in this new ecosystem? In the 20th century, one would try to ingratiate oneself with the gatekeepers, the editors. As they are still part of the ecosystem and probably will be for some time in the future, this strategy is still valuable, but it is only one of many. More important, if anything, is to build support networks with your colleagues, peers and buddies. The concepts of ‘Friends in Low Places’ and ‘Horizontal Loyalty’ are not just theoretical – put them to practice.

You may think of two potential career routes: getting hired as a staff writer somewhere (getting harder with each passing year), or to freelance. But there is a third way now: start and build your own media empire.

Huffington Post, DailyKos, Talking Points Memo, BoingBoing started out as unknown person’s personal blogs – after turning into group blogs, then adding functionalities that let readers contribute, today they are media organizations that make money, hire and pay editors, and more. Perhaps your own blog can turn into something like this. But teaming up with your own Friends In Low Places may make such a start-up more successful.

First you have to write

People who want to become professional writers are, I assume, people who always liked to write. Childhood diaries. LiveJournals filled with teenage angst. Long Facebook updates. It’s time to take this seriously and do your writing in a more serious, organized, professional manner. Start a blog. This is your writing laboratory. Start blogging about science. Nobody will know about your blog until you start promoting it, so don’t worry that your early posts are clumsy (you can even delete the first few embarrassing posts later, once you are happy with your blog and start promoting it).

Practice the usual journalistic forms – the feature, the interview, the brief news story with inverted pyramid. You will need to demonstrate that you are capable of writing in such forms and styles. But don’t limit yourself to traditional forms. Experiment with new forms. Explain animal behavior by letting animals have a dialogue. Explain science in the form of a fairy tale, Science Fiction or a poem. Try your hand at photography. Draw or paint or graph your own art, illustrations, infographics, cartoons and comic strips. Put some effort into making a video or animation every now and then. Record a podcast sometimes. Give data journalism a try. Try your hand at learning to code (but see). See what works for you.

Try to figure out your beat (or obsession) – what is it that excites you the most? Write about that. Try to find your own niche. Become a “go to” person on a particular topic, become an expert (or at least a temporary expert) on that topic.

Ignore the “professional” advice about having to blog daily. It was a necessity a decade ago, not any more. In the days of RSS feeds and social media, it does not matter for your readers any more – they will find your posts no matter how infrequently you post. It only matters for you and your own writing habit that you blog with some regularity.

Also ignore the “professional” advice about writing relatively short blog posts. Leave that for brief news articles. Blog posts are longform, at least most of the time. And longform works online much better than short articles – the traffic keeps on giving for years, as people rediscover long posts, see them as resources, and share with their friends.

Also important to remember: You’re A Human, So Write Like One. How do I write? First I read and study the topic. Then, I compose text in my head (usually during dog walks, often over a number of days, sometimes even months), imagining I am explaining something to a good non-scientist friend. Then I sit down and quickly transcribe that. Quick proofread. Click “Publish”.

Like every other skill, writing needs practice. Write every day, something, anything. That’s what makes the blog useful – you have a platform for your words every day. You’ll get better. When you write something for publication, watch carefully what the editor changed in your manuscript and learn from it. Read a lot of good writing, paying attention to how other writers accomplish their goals.

The hard-line “never write for free” slogan is a hold-over from some old, outdated times. Early on in your career, you will write for free quite a lot, especially on your blog. Your blog becomes your portfolio, your PR material. As you become a professional, you will learn how to reject offers to write for free, and will mostly write for pay. But even then, there will be times when you will want to write for free – on your own blog (or your Mom’s neighborhood newsletter). You will want to experiment with a new form, or a new topic. Or you will want to write something that would be hard to sell. Or you wrote something on commission, got rejected, got paid your kill-fee, and now want to see your work out there, meeting the readers.

Or, if you are a natural born writer, every now and then there will be a story inside of you, fighting to burst out of your chest and get expressed in words or visuals, and you won’t care if it’s paid or not, you want it out, and your blog will be there waiting for just such pieces.

Getting started with your blog

It’s easy. Go to WordPress.com (or some other platform, but WordPress has recently become a standard and is probably your best bet) and start one. Pick a name (and a URL) that is catchy, memorable yet informative about the main topic of the blog. Make at least some minimal effort to make it look pretty. Fill out the ‘About Me’ page, put buttons for your various social media accounts on the sidebar, and provide a method for readers to contact you. Start posting.

Get in a rhythm – decide you will post something on your blog every day or every week and stick to it. Sometimes, it will just be a few links or a YouTube video. Other times, you will write something more substantial. Start with book reviews – those are relatively easy. Do Q&As with scientists. Cover new papers in “ResearchBlogging” fashion. One day a seriously good post will come out of all your daily thinking in the shower and during dog walks.

Learn about science blogging, its theory and history. Learn about best blogging practices. Learn about the ethics of online writing and blogging, including the ethic of the link and the ethic of the quote.

If you make a statement, link to the source or to additional information. If you quote somebody, provide the link to the original context (including audio file or transcript if you yourself did the interview). A quote with a link increases your trust with the readers. A quote without a link decreases your trust with the readers – it’s a red flag that you are trying to manipulate them. And always try to link to the scientific papers you write about, even if they are behind paywalls.

Decide if you want to have commenting on your blog or not, and what kind of (technological and human) comment moderation you need. Come up with your moderation policy. Be prepared to be present in your own commenting threads in order to keep them constructive.

Another option is to join a group blog. Double X Science, Last Word On Nothing, Deep Sea News, Southern Fried Science, Science-Based Medicine, Real Climate, Biofortified and Panda’s Thumb are a few examples of excellent group blogs with high visibility, which authors can use as springboards for their writing careers. This reduces the pressure on any individual blogger to post with high frequency, as collectively they will produce plenty of new material on the homepage every day.

It is also OK to just write guest posts on other people’s blogs. A number of science blogging networks have designated guest blogs for just such occasions. We here have two such blogs – Guest Blog and MIND Guest Blog – but other bloggers on the network may also sometimes accept a guest post.

Even if you run your own blog, it is not a bad idea to occasionally write a really good one for a Guest Blog on a media-owned network. A post on our Guest Blog counts as a clip in your portfolio, is highly visible, will show up high on Google searches for your name, and thus will serve you well as your promotional material when you start pitching or applying for jobs.

You can find a number of good links about getting started, and about running your blog, on this wiki page.

Get some professional training

If you are further along in your career (e.g., research career) you may feel too old to waste another year or two of your life by going back to school. But if you are younger, e.g., just out of college, you may want to consider getting a Master’s at one of the specialized Science, Health and Environmental Reporting/Writing programs. There are several excellent programs to choose from, e.g., NYU, UCSC, MIT, UGA, UNC, USC, City University (London), UW-Madison and several others.

If that is too long (or expensive) for you, spend a summer at a science writing workshop, e.g., Banff or Santa Fe.

Or, if you are still in school, take some writing or journalism classes despite not needing them officially for your major.

Try to get an internship, perhaps in one of the popular science magazines. Nothing prepares you better than learning on the job.

Attend meetings with professional writing and journalism workshops, talks, panels and discussions, e.g,. ScienceWriters (NASW/CASW), ScienceOnline (either the annual flagship meeting in Raleigh, or one of the growing number of satellite events), AAAS annual meeting, SpotOn, or WCSJ. Use the opportunity to get to know (and get known by) editors and others whose careers are well in advance of yours, but also to meet your own peers and start forming your own posse of ‘Friends In Low Places’. Many of those events also have “Pitch sessions” where you can pitch your story ideas directly to editors.

Start reading, regularly and closely, sites that discuss journalism (especially science, environmental and health journalism), provide writing tips, provide media criticism, or provide information about unreliable scientific papers. These should probably include KSJ Tracker, CJR Observatory, NASW, Nieman Journalism Lab, The Open Notebook, The Science Writers’ Handbook, Embargo Watch, Retraction Watch, HealthNewsReview, SpotOn Blog, Communication Breakdown, and right here – The SA Incubator (I’d have listed the NYT Green Blog here, but sadly, it is now dead).

Read good science blogging by setting up ScienceSeeker as your homepage. Find out which blogs you like, subscribe to them, post comments, perhaps start out your own blogging by emulating their style until you develop your own.

Shameless Self-Promotion

If a blog post is published in a forest,….?

OK, you’ve been blogging for a while and now you are happy with your posts. You are ready for readers and their feedback. How do you get the readers to your blog? Good readers, with relevant interests and backgrounds, those who can provide valuable feedback?

First things first. Make your blog an official science blog by applying to have it aggregated at ScienceSeeker. ScienceSeeker is a portal for science writing and blogging, a result of fusion and then further development of Scienceblogging.org and Researchblogging.org (COI: I am one of the founders of ScienceSeeker, which is a ScienceOnline project). It keeps getting developed and adding new features.

Neither Google Blogsearch nor Technorati are good at filtering science blogs. They pull in spam blogs, blogs with a science tag that have no science content whatsoever, as well as blogs that push pseudoscience, anti-science, medical quakery and other silly or dangerous nonsense. As only approved science blogs can be found at ScienceSeeker, it has unofficially become a ‘stamp of approval’, a way to filter out the noise and focus on the quality content that one can filter in various ways, from topical filters, to only posts covering papers, to ‘Editors’ Picks’. A number of journal publishers and media organizations are now using ScienceSeeker to get metrics on how much their articles were blogged about. In its effort to preserve science blogs for posterity, Library Of Congress is using Science Seeker as the filtering mechanism guiding their decisions what to preserve. So get your blog on there. It will bring you reputation, traffic, and just the right kinds of readers to provide you with feedback.

Nominate your posts for various awards and collections, e.g., Open Laboratory, 3QD science prize, ScienceSeeker Awards, Science Studio (podcasts and videos) and others. This will give them visibility as people check out all the nominations.

Register and become a respected user on sites like Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, Stumbleupon and/or Fark. Be sure you know their policies well (e.g., Reddit will let only a small proportion of your links be to your own work). Don’t waste too much time on those sites, but you can use them to find interesting links to share, to share other people’s work, and to occasionally share links to your own posts and articles. If one of your posts catches fire on one of those sites, make sure your server can take it, and be present – you will be busy for a few hours moderating comments, deleting especially obnoxious, snarky, nasty or idiotic ones. But some comments will be good, and a small proportion out of those tens of thousands of visitors will bookmark you, keep coming back and will become your regular readers.

Have a nice-looking homepage (you can make it with WordPress, or use a specialized platform like About.Me, or pay a designer friend to make you one). Your homepage should have a short, easy to remember URL so you can shout it out on the street and people will be able to spell it, remember it, and find it later when they go online that night. This is your single most important URL that you will place everywhere – on your business cards, and on profile pages on all the social media and other sites that let you have a profile. Everywhere you are online should link back to your homepage. And your homepage should link to everywhere else you are online.

Your blog can serve as your homepage, or be a prominent and central part of your homepage. If not, make sure your homepage prominently links to your external blog. Make sure your homepage has a well written and accurate About/Bio page, contact information, link to your CV, and your Portfolio with links to all of your published work (perhaps your photography or videos or art on separate tabs). And of course, provide links to all the social media where you have accounts.

If you are lucky, you will be invited to join a blogging network, which makes your blog even more visible. If you are VERY lucky, you will be invited to move your blog to a media site as a blogger/columnist, like Ezra Klein at Washington Post, Nate Silver at NYTimes, or the Phenomena quartet at National Geographic.

If you are just embarking on the professional career in science writing, we can help right here at The SA Incubator. Khalil and I post our weekly “Picks” – if you have written something you are proud of, don’t be shy to send the link to us. If we like it, we’ll link to it. Then we may ask you to do one of the “Introducing” Q&As, a great opportunity to present your past career, skills, links and goals that will turn out very high on Google searches once potential employers start googling you.

The necessity of social media

There are many social networks out there, some general some specialized, as well as platforms which include some social media elements. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, Picassa, YouTube, Vimeo, DeviantArt, Instagram, Pinterest, FriendFeed, Branch, Quora, Goodreads, MySpace, LiveJournal, Orkut, Diaspora, SoundCloud, Slideshare, Storify, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley, FigShare, CiteULike, and many more. Which ones to use? I suggest you use one or two that fit you best, but also take a few minutes to set up profiles on many other networks. That way, people who find you on those sites can click on the link and find themselves on your homepage, where they can see where you are really active.

This wiki has a lot of great resources for starting out and using a number of those sites professionally, as a scientist or a science writer. Pay special attention to the pages about Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, as those are the three biggies you should probably pay most attention to.

Let’s focus on Twitter now. It is essential for a journalist. Not having – and using – a Twitter account today is like not having an email address ten years ago (and yes, some cutting-edge people are completely abandoning email and doing all of their communications over social media).

Big companies have suffered losses because their old-timey PR teams were unaware of the backlash on social media, and then incapable of responding correctly on social media. Businesses can lose money if they are missing key information that appears only on social media. Academia is especially horribly insulated and way behind the times. But nowhere is use of social media as important as in journalism. Don’t be this guy who was completely oblivious that his newspaper was in the center of national maelstrom of harsh criticism, because “I only deal with what’s on paper”.

When an airplane skidded off the runway in Denver, I knew it, along with 100,000s of other people, 12 minutes before everyone else. A passenger tweeted about it, and it spread like wildfire, including his updates, blurry photos, etc. CNN had a brief piece 12 minutes later. The accidental “citizen journalist” scooped them. Sometimes, for some news, these 12 minutes may be crucial for you.

Twitter and Facebook were key methods of communication not just between participants, but also to the outside world, during the Mumbai attacks and the Arab Spring.

People got jobs and gigs on Twitter that started their careers.

Journalists on deadline quickly find expert sources for their stories.

Journalists who observed the massive, instant, intense and scathing reactions of experts to #arseniclife or #Encode did not make the mistake of filing their positive stories and then having to backpedal later.

If all you see on Twitter is garbage, you are following the wrong people. You have to carefully choose who to follow, and then learn how to filter. Unfollowing is easy, and polite. You are not dissing your Mom, as if you would if you unfriended her on Facebook.

Don’s use Twitter.com. Use an app. There is a lot of outcry right now (by myself as well) about the imminent demise of some Tweetdeck apps (version 0.38.2 is by far the best, if you can have it and keep it indefinitely – other apps are OK on smartphones, e.g., HootSuite or Twitterific). It is important to me not to have Twitter/Tweetdeck as yet another tab in my browser, a place where I have to go and spend time. Twitter is not a site to go to and spend time on. Twitter should be a part of the workflow, silently running in the back, behind my open browser.

Tweets show up in the corner and 99% of the time I do not even notice them. I am busy with something else, and I mentally block them out. But I have a “search image” (a term from ethology – a bird does not systematically scan every inch of tree bark, instead it has a search image for the shape and color of its prey insect and automatically homes in on it). If a tweet shows up with my name in it, or a specific word in it, or by a specific person, I will notice and take a glance. If there is nothing important, I only lost 1/10th of a second and can go back to what I was doing. If it seems important, I will Favorite the tweet (if unsure of the quality of content) or Retweet it (if it comes from a trusted source), so I can have it saved to read later. If it seems important and urgent, I will click through and investigate. Perhaps this is information that is more important to me than whatever else I happen to be doing at the time. And even then, I will probably spend only a few minutes on it before returning to whatever I was doing before.

In Tweetdeck (or any similar app), one should have a number of columns – move them around: the default position may not the the best one for you (I move “All Friends” far away to the right so I don’t have to see it almost ever). Mentions and Direct Messages are your more important columns, but also make several that follow Lists (your own, or other people’s), or display tweets that contain particular words or hashtags (your “Saved Searches”). I will add a column for an event hashtag while the event is on, then delete the column afterward. Play around until you refine your filtering this way.

Here are some good lists to get you started – follow them, and also follow some of the listed people directly – you decide who is useful to you:

ScienceSeeker Members
Best mindcasters I know
Young Smart Newsies
Top Journalism Linkers
Young science writers
ScienceOnline 2013 attendees
Blogs and bloggers on the Scientific American blog network
SciAm Contributors

If there is something I’d like to tweet out, that is easy, too. No need to go to Twitter. Get some kind of Bit.ly or AddThis bookmarklet for your browser and you can tweet any link in two clicks (perhaps with a little editing, to add/remove stuff from the tweet so it’s just the way you want it).

What kind of stuff you can – and perhaps should – do on Twitter? There are several different things. First, you can just use it to find information, to pick up good links, or to eavesdrop on conversations. Treat it as a river of news – sometimes you dip in, sometimes you go away. You won’t miss much while you are away. If information is really important, it will have staying power – many people will still be linking to it, retweeting it, and discussing it next time you log in. If you missed it – it’s not important.

You can, of course, post your personal musings, but if you are going to use Twitter like a professional, keep that to the minimum. I bet less than 1% of my tweets are in this vein.

You can retweet others. Your followers do not see everything tweeted by everyone you follow. Twitter is very asymmetrical – you don’t follow those who follow you, not automatically. You follow those who are useful to you, and you are followed by people who find you useful. Thus, if someone tweets, and you retweet, this will be fresh to many of your followers. If they RT in turn, they will spread it to their followers and so on, in concentric circles, spreading the message out further and further. A tweet can go a long way.

You can engage in conversations. It’s OK to butt into other people’s conversations, but be polite and be useful and constructive. If you know the answer to someone’s question, provide it. If you are at a University and have library access, you can help your freelance colleagues in search of papers – they will use the hashtag #Icanhazpdf (but first carefully read the comment section of this post to understand the legal, moral and etiquette aspects of it).

You can be a useful filter for others. Post links to good articles and blog posts. Everyone tweets links to NYTimes, BBC and The Guardian – you don’t have to. Instead, set up Google (and Google News and Google Blogsearch) alerts for the keywords in the domain of your expertise and interest. It can be “watersheds” or “science+superheros” (one of mine is “circadian”, naturally). Some of those links in the alerts will be very interesting, yet from obscure publications. People will soon realize you are the “go to” person for that topic. Follow a few good by less-well-known blogs. Tweet out links to their posts.

Broadcast links to your own posts. But do it politely and judiciously. Tweet once in the morning. Then again that day “for the afternoon crowd”, then once next day “for those who missed it yesterday”. That should be sufficient. DM (direct message) the link to a few people with more followers than you have but who are aware of you and know who you are. Ask them to take a look, provide feedback, and they are likely to retweet it if they like it.

Here are some quick rules you should memorize on how to be a useful and respectable contributor to social media.

And finally, if you are really well organized and dedicated, you can truly use Twitter as a part of your journalistic flow – from individual tweets, to aggregations of tweets – both your own and replies you got (e.g., on Facebook or Storify), to longer blog posts, to magazine articles, to books.

Moving on to Facebook, the strangest animal of them all, undergoing a metamorphosis every year or so, often abruptly changing people’s privacy settings, expectations and experiences. That makes many people uneasy about it.

You have to be sensitive that there are two main styles of Facebook use. One is personal, the other is professional. It is perfectly OK to keep settings to ‘Private’ and to friend only family and best friends, share vacation pictures and not much else. It is perfectly OK if you prefer to use it that way. But perhaps you should set up another Facebook Page for your professional outreach. This is where you post interesting science links, urge other scientists, writers, journalists and bloggers to follow your page. Keep the two worlds separate.

Many people, including myself, do not separate the two worlds. Yes, I occasionally post personal stuff, but I mainly post links to science stories on my personal profile, which is set completely on ‘Public’. I have many FB friends, and of them many are not inherently interested in science. By being my FB friends, they get served their daily dose of science anyway. Many are thankful for this. This is the so-called “push” method of science communication, where you push science onto unsuspecting audiences. The reverse is “pull” method, in which people who are already interested in your stuff will know how to seek you and find you if they know your stuff is good (people interested in science know where to look for Scientific American).

There is a lot of scientifically incorrect information floating around Facebook. One of your roles can be as a “downer” – the person who brings in a link to the scientific information that corrects the pseudoscience. And yes, your aunt may get really angry at you because of it, but at least some of aunt’s FB friends will learn something from your link, perhaps share it elsewhere.

And now the elephant in the room – Google Plus. It is not easy to figure out what it is and how to use it and how to find good stuff on it. But if you are using any Google product (e.g., Gmail) you are already on G+ even if you are not using it. Thus, it has tons of people on there already. And unlike some past Google experiments (like Google Buzz and Google Wave), this one does not appear to be going anywhere – it is here to stay, and it’s a monster. I have more G+ subscribers than Twitter followers or FB friends. Most of them have zero background in science. The least you can do is throw some science links at them, even if you do not have time to engage further. Lots of traffic comes from there, so it’s worth a second or two to plop in a link.

What is important to know is that scientists, science bloggers and writers were some of the early invitees to the Beta version of G+ before public launch. They have explored the platform from the very early days. There are many of them there, and many are active. They are experimenting with new functionalities, especially cool uses for Google Hangouts. Find “Scientists” circles and start following people. Even if you don’t engage with it fully now, keep an eye on it, keep your presence on it, I would not bet against Google that this will wither and die.

Next step

You are writing every day. You are blogging regularly. After six months of regular Twitter use, you now have some followers and interaction. Perhaps you joined a popular group blog or even a blogging network. You have a few guest blog posts elsewhere, perhaps a few clips from school or local papers, or when you did an internship. It’s time to start pitching.

Different editors have different preferences for pitches. But many will explore your blog, your prior clips, your social media activity (potential employers for staff jobs will do that very thoroughly).

If you pitch me for the Guest Blog, for example, and I have never heard of you before, you need to write me a longish, polished pitch. Show me that you can write, that you can write a pitch just as perfectly as you will write the article itself later on.

But if I know you from your blog, from Twitter, perhaps some previous work, you don’t need to do that. You can DM me on Twitter with a very brief pitch and I am likely to say Yes.

Now go and write.

Raw in! (Too much? Yeah, too much…)

–

Kyle Hill embraces his inner geek mode yet again this time diving deep into AMC’s hit show The Walking Dead. In his post for Scientific American’s Guest blog, Kyle looks at the science of zombification.

The Komodo Dead: What Really Kills in The Walking Dead

You don’t need a gun. You don’t need a knife or a machete or an axe. If you find yourself in a post-apocalyptic world filled with shambling swallowers of human flesh, what you really need is good hygiene. The resurgence of zombies into pop culture has tickled our morbid curiosity, but has also sparked many nerdy debates about viruses and disease. Arguably the most popular zombie narrative today, The Walking Dead takes place in the wake of an airborne virus or pathogen that has enabled the dead to walk among the living. [...]

It might not look like it judging by the snowy and freezing conditions in Europe, but spring has nearly arrived in the northern hemisphere. And with spring comes “grand show of rebirth.” In her piece for Smithosonian.com’s Surprising Science, Rachel Nuwer looks at some particularly stunning rebirths.

Sea Monkeys, Ferns and Frozen Frogs: Nature’s Very Own Resurrecting Organisms

As Easter draws near, we begin to notice signs of nature’s very own annual resurrection event. Warming weather begins “breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” as T.S. Elliot noted, and “stirring dull roots with spring rain.” Where a black and white wintery landscape just stood, now technicolor crocus buds peak through the earth and green shoots brighten up the azalea bushes.

Robert T. Gonzalez, at io9, distills the misconceptions that surrounds GMOs, arguing that critics mostly miss the point. He then leads us to what he believes the main issue should be.

GMOs are one solution to an ancient puzzle

Genetically modified organisms are not the enemy. They’re not even the problem. In fact, our ability to tweak the genetic code of crops and other organisms is a new approach to solving one of humanity’s oldest puzzles: how do we feed ourselves? And how do we do it safely?

Suzi Gage on her Guardian blog, Sifting the Evidence, asks whether it is ethical for doctors to prescribe placebos to their unknowing patients. This discussion is not new but Suzi adds to it by looking at a recent large-scale study.

The ethicality of prescribing placebos

According to a recent study, doctors sometimes prescribe treatments they don’t have any evidence for. Is this ethical? Almost all UK GPs have at some point given a patient a treatment they don’t need. This is according to the results of a survey of 783 of them across the country, conducted by researchers at Oxford and Southampton, and published in PLOS One recently.

Dinosaurs are cool. Dinosaur embryos are even cooler. Especially when they entail discovering something new about dinosaurs. By Jon Tennant on his EGU blog Green Tea And Velociraptors, which is all about dinosaurs. (Yes, I do love dinosaurs.)

Slicing up dinosaur embryos. For science.

Birds are living, breathing, tweeting dinosaurs. That is scientific knowledge backed up by overwhelming evidence, but the evidence basis for it grows strong all the time. We know that they are related from a host of morphological evidence from the last 150 million years or so. Our understanding of the origins of feathers and flight are developing too – each new finding is a piece that slots into a puzzle, where we already have a pretty good idea of what the picture we’re trying to recreate is. The evidence is mounting too with each new discovery – findings from China are rewriting the way we think about the evolution of feathers and flight, and the evolution of early birds from their dinosaurian ancestors.

A few more:

• Shuffling to safety by Sara Mynott.

• How useful is ‘screen time’? by Pete Etchells on his SciLogs.com blog Counterbalanced.

• Rain clouds: From dust to lawn by Akshat Rathi for The Economist’s Babbage blog.

• No molecule left unchecked by Arielle Duhaime-Ross for Scienceline.

Have a nice extended weekend, y’all.

Periodically, we’ll cover some of those student-run science publications here on The SA Incubator. Today, editor-in-chief Amy Hayward tells us about the new issue of Au Science Magazine, the student science publication of Aberdeen University in Scotland. Highlights from this issue: the man who sees through clothes, scientists who thrust art paintings in particle accelerators. Science!

You can read our introduction to Au Science Magazine on this blog.

A great deal of science fiction became fact in 2012: the advent of spray on skin (brainchild of Dr Fiona Wood), 3D printers creating entire houses, artificial leaves generating electricity, electronic eye implants, and super-flexible glass with the potential to wrap itself around you. The same kind of fiction has become fact in Au Science Magazine’s latest issue.

The theme of this issue, Hidden Science, is especially important to the team at Au as our magazine endeavours to publicise brilliant science that may otherwise go unnoticed. The articles cover the extraordinary that is happening perhaps in our own everyday lives. With an interview with the man who can see through clothes, a look at the people trying to watch earthquakes coming, and a report on the guys who shove paintings in particle accelerators in the name of science (and art history), there’s something for everyone in issue six. We even have a special feature on the passion of exploring, and the history behind it, written by the University’s Library & Special collections centre.

Tim Drysdale is a man with a superpower: the power to see through clothes. We caught up with Tim in our feature interview, after his Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award Lecture, to learn more about this power. Far from being his only research interest, Tim told Au how the Terahertz technology making airport security scanners possible has applications in pharmaceutical and medical industries. Still weird-tech-related, Josh Doyle (@Jo_Do) takes us on a tour from Rembrandt to Van Gogh exploring advances in x-ray technologies that mean researchers can peel back the paint and unearth long-forgotten masterpieces. What Lies Beneath merges the unlikely partners, science and art history, to explore how a dalliance with a Van Gogh painting in a 300 m particle accelerator did not end with disaster, but instead went a great way to refining techniques used to examine fine art pieces for uncovered paintings.

An extra special feature in this issue is our picture spread on the Northern Lights in and around Aberdeen. This was written by PhD student, Kenny Muir, who uses his spare time to produce incredible images of the Aurora Borealis.  Kenny approached us back in September with the idea of writing about his interest in capturing these majestic light shows. Upon viewing his portfolio of work, we quickly picked up upon just how spectacular Kenny’s photography was. With such a stunning array of images, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to give Kenny the centre fold section. The way his article is laid out, it is possible for readers to pull the picture out of our magazine and hang it on your wall.

The Au Science Magazine Team from left to right: Top row: Josh Doyle, Bridget Murray. Middle row: Tom Mackenzie, Anna Cederlund, Dean Brooks. Bottom Row: Amy Hayward, Zoe McKellar, Kirsty Nutt.

Another striking feature of issue six is our use of talented illustrators to create a colourful spread of articles.  Vanessa De Mello (@vanchanted) sketched her way into our hearts with a lovely picture complimenting an article about the subtleties of social interactions, while Antek Sieczkowski provided us with charming illustrations for articles on fear of the dark, Bump in the Night, and predicting earthquakes, Predicting the Unpredictable. Cartoonist and physicist, Sandy Gardner (@teamboring), provides some hilarity in the form of a comic about the independent nature of mathematics. We’re tremendously grateful to all of our illustrators for providing our articles with such a wonderful compliment of images and cartoons.

Wherever possible we seek to showcase the brilliant science going on in the North East of Scotland, so our news pieces on the Aberdeen researchers going to the edges (and depths) of the planet in search for novel antibiotics and the local physicist looking beyond Einstein, with a particle that could overshadow the Higgs-Boson, are also especially close to our heart.

If you’d like to read issue six, head on over to our website where you can download your own copy and join the discussion. Our own social media scientists can also be found on Twitter and Facebook, just waiting for your thoughts on science.  For more information about Au Science Magazine and how to get involved email info@ausm.org.uk.

Amy Hayward

Editor-in-Chief of Au Science Magazine

Where do you begin the story of genetically modified food? At a modern beginning, with Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel, arguably the father of genetics as we know it today? Perhaps it’s best to turn the clock forward 40 years or so to 1901. That’s the year an American businessman borrowed money to get into the artificial sugar business. He christened his start-up after his wife’s maiden name: Monsanto. A third option: Dive head-first into the “GM food must be bad” controversy replete with fear-mongering. (And fear assuaging as talented science writers debunk headline-grabbers.)…

The Plan to Bring the Iconic Passenger Pigeon Back From Extinction by Kelly Servick:

Twelve birds lie belly-up in a wooden drawer at the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Bloated with stuffing, their ruddy brown chests resemble a row of sweet potatoes. Slate-blue heads and thin white tails protrude in perfect alignment, except for one bird that cranes its neck to face its neighbor. A pea-sized bulge of white cotton sits where its eye should be. A slip of paper tied to its foot reads, “Ectopistes migratorius. Manitoba. 1884.” This is the passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird in North America. When Europeans first landed on the continent, they encountered billions of the birds. By 1914 they were extinct….

Eye Trials Give Hope for Stem Cells by Hannah Waters:

After the pioneering stem cell company Geron, which launched the first-ever clinical trial for a human embryonic stem cell (hESC) therapy in 2010, shuttered its stem cell program last November for financial reasons, a shadow fell over the field of stem cell medicine. But yesterday, optimism rose as the stem cell research company Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) published in The Lancet preliminary data from two human patients, each with a different degenerative eye disorder, showing safety and perhaps even some efficacy of an hESC treatment….

Bat-Eating Spiders: The Most Terrifying Thing You’ll See Today by Nadia Drake:

A bat’s enemies: owls, hawks, snakes, the Joker, spiders. Spiders? Yes. The incidence of spiders eating bats could be more widespread than initially suspected, reports a study published March 13 in PLoS ONE. To reach this conclusion, the authors spoke with scientists, conducted an extensive scientific literature review, dug through the blogosphere, and looked for pictures of spiders eating bats on Flickr…

5-Million-Year-Old Saber-Toothed Cat Fossil Discovered by Tanya Lewis:

A new genus and species of extinct saber-toothed cat has been found in Polk County, Fla., scientists say. The fossil, which is 5 million years old, is related to the well-known carnivorous predator Smilodon fatalis from the La Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles. The group of saber-toothed cats called Smilodontini was thought to have originated in the Old World and later migrated to North America, but the new species’ age suggests the group evolved in North America, researchers reported March 13 in the journal PLOS ONE….

Horse therapy by Laura Geggel:

Anecdotal evidence and the results from several small studies suggest that children with autism benefit from interacting with dogs, horses and dolphins. But most of these studies haven’t rigorously evaluated the benefits of animal therapy, and even fewer have looked at whether the potential benefits extend beyond the interaction with the animal to real-world settings, such as schools….

Twitter: Public Health’s Newest Tool by Emery Rogers:

Twitter users send about 500 million tweets each day–an endless pool of data pouring into cyberspace. Now, the public health and epidemiology community is taking note of this pool of self-generated data and using it as a way to possibly address the origin and spread of disease….

Treading Softly in a Connected World by Natalie Wolchover:

Gene Stanley never walks down stairs without holding the handrail. For a fit 71-year-old, he is deathly afraid of breaking his hip. In the elderly, such breaks can trigger fatal complications, and Stanley, a professor of physics at Boston University, thinks he knows why….

Why that echoey phone feedback drives us nuts by Jordan Gaines:

Perhaps you’ve been chatting on your cell phone or Skyping with a friend when, suddenly, you hear your voice echoed on the other end. It’s a strange feeling, right?…

Distracted eaters likely to take in more calories by Kathleen Raven:

People who eat meals or snacks while watching TV, playing games or reading tend to consume more calories in a sitting, and especially later in the day, according to a review of two dozen past studies….

Don’t start drinking for your health: Experts by Kathryn Doyle:

Moderate drinking has been linked to several benefits, but it’s too soon to pour a glass in pursuit of physical wellness. That was the response of several doctors and alcohol researchers to an editorial based on a critical analysis of recent studies in the journal Addiction…..

The Pocket Breathalyzer by Jaya Mathur:

Here’s one way you could avoid a nerve-wracking, potentially life-altering breathalyzer test on the side of the road: give yourself a breathalyzer test before you even get behind the wheel….

Tadpoles See with Extra Eyes by Sabrina Richards:

Blind tadpoles can be gifted with sight from grafted eye tissue—even when that tissue is put in their tails. In new research published today (February 27) in The Journal of Experimental Biology, researchers at Tufts University showed that eyes grafted onto tadpole tails allowed the amphibians to learn the difference between two colors of light—even though the new eyes’ nerves don’t reach the brain….

Natural STD Protection for Women? by Kate Yandell:

The cells lining the human female reproductive tract continually express an immune protein that may help protect against infection, according to a study published today (February 28) in Science. The protein, called interferon-ε, improved symptoms of genital herpes and chlamydia in mice….

DNA Machines Inch Forward by Sabrina Richards:

Wikimedia Commons, M Strong et al.Advances in nanotechnology are paving the way for a variety of “intelligent” nano-devices, from those that seek out and kill cancer cells to microscopic robots that build designer drugs. In the push to create such nano-sized devices, researchers have come to rely on DNA. With just a few bases, DNA may not have the complexity of amino acid-based proteins, but some scientists find this minimalism appealing….

Salt at Fault? by Kate Yandell:

Salt may play an important role in autoimmune diseases, according to two new papers published today (March 6) in Nature. Exposure to high levels of salt was found to make both cultured mouse and human T cells more pathogenic, and high-salt diets worsened autoimmune disease in mice….

Building a Better Schizophrenic Mouse by Emily Underwood:

Hallucinations and paranoia aren’t the only symptoms that make life difficult for people with schizophrenia. Problems with memory and other cognitive functions also interfere with daily tasks, such as remembering the way to the office or balancing a checkbook. Now, by dampening the activity of a small group of neurons deep within the mouse brain, researchers have produced cognitive deficits similar to those found in those with schizophreniaa discovery that they say could potentially lead to new treatments for the disorder, which affects roughly 24 million people worldwide. …