Tags
animals, Bacteria, biology, blogging, evolution, Insecta, Research, science, Science communication
Today officially marks the first anniversary of Inspiring Science, and it’s been a great year! I think I managed to make some progress towards the goals I outlined in my first post. Over the course of the past year, I’ve learned how to make my writing more accessible and become better at engaging with non-scientists, though unfortunately I haven’t managed to write as frequently as I would have liked. I hope I can rectify that and continue to improve those skills, but I’m also going to try to do a better job of fostering discussion over the next 12 months. I have a few ideas about how to do that; we’ll see how well they pan out. (If you have a suggestion, let me know!)
If you’re one of the newer readers, why not take a romp through the archives? There’s some good stuff buried on there that doesn’t often make it onto the “What’s popular now?” list in the sidebar. I’ve also picked five posts from the past year which I wish had received more attention and listed them below; I hope you’ll enjoy them.
- Natural selection: On fitness
- Social wasps are specialists at recognizing faces
- Of moss and micro-arthropods
- We still don’t know how birds navigate
- Gene expression: shape matters
With that said, I look forward to another year of writing about science; thanks for reading, commenting and generally keeping me company on this adventure! If you have any suggestions about what I could do differently or better (or what I’m doing well) please leave a comment so I can learn and improve. 🙂
Inspiring Science 
I’ve been really enjoying following your blog, and I particularly like seeing references at the end of articles because then it feels like “real science”, but explained, rather than some heavily popularised newspaper version which should not be believed. Keep writing!
Sorry, I posted this comment in the wrong place! I went back and read a former post, “Pointing ravens and theory of mind,” that I hadn’t seen before. I think it’s one of my favorites because it reinforces the notion that birds and other animals are often far more intelligent that we believe them to be, in this case even going so far as to try to direct and share one another’s attention. My question in reading it was, so how does this benefit science and our attitudes towards animals, which upon further reading, you answered. I think you present a wide range of topics and write in such a way that everyone can take something away from reading your posts. I never fail to learn something new!
Reblogged this on Oyia Brown.
I’ve enjoyed your posts! Good science writing is so important—especially now when we have so many environmental issues to tackle. Looking forward to seeing more..
Congrats, keep them coming!!!! (:-)
Thanks for all the wonderful feedback everyone!
@Rose: I’m glad you like the references! I sometimes have to leave them out when I write for another venue (eg, competitions) and it always bothers me. To be honest, I wish it was more common to include references or a “further reading” list. It’s nice to be able to find the original source and/or learn more about a subject quickly.
@Jo Ann: That post was part of a loosely connected series (including the wasp post in my list and another one about bees) about non-human animals overcoming our prejudices. That’s an important theme to me and one that will probably keep reappearing on Inspiring Science; I’m glad to hear that it resonates with you.
Congratulations Sedeer, I have been silently following this in the background and am imrpessed with it so far. Always a pleasure to read what you have to bring to our attentionl.