3 Quarks Daily has finished gathering nominations for its science blog prize, and you can now vote for your favorite. From the top 20 vote-getters, the editors of 3QD will then select six finalists, from which the winners will be chosen by Steven Pinker. The public voting closes at midnight, June 8 EST.
If you don’t already know about 3 Quarks Daily, check it out. It’s an elegant group blog that links to all sorts of interesting stuff on science, art, literature, politics, and philosophy. They also put “gossip” in the list of topics in their banner, but I don’t recall anything on Angelina Jolie or Mel Gibson. This morning, for example, they’ve posted stuff on the evolution of house cats and the leader of the defeated Tamil rebels on Sri Lanka.
Yesterday, the folks at 3QD made an announcement:
We have decided to start awarding four prizes every year in the respective areas of Science, Arts & Literature, Politics, and Philosophy for the best blog post in those fields.
First up is the prize for blogs on science. Readers are invited to nominate posts from May 24, 2008 to May 24, 2009, posting the url in the comment section of the announcement post. The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will winnow down the nominations, and then Harvard linguist Steven Pinker will select the first, second, and third prize winners. (The top prize comes with a $1000 award.) The deadline is June 1.
Now, if, on the outside chance, you wanted to nominate a blog post from the Loom, who am I to interfere with my wise readers? In fact, let me help you out a little. Here’s a list of posts from the past year that I’m particularly pleased with, in reverse chronological order.
Life On Earth: A Losing Game of Whack-A-Mole?
How To Be A Bat [Life in Motion]
Unchecked Ice: A Saga in Five Chapters
Live Blogging The Mars Methane Mystery: Aliens At Last?
The Puppet Master’s Medicine Chest
The Evolution of the Face: A Letter to Some Readers in Tennessee
You Want A Piece of This? (Please Please Please Don’t Take a Piece of This!)
Even Blood Flukes Get Divorced
There’s a particular kind of blog post I enjoy–the kind that sounds just like one of those enjoyable rants you hear from a friend in a bar. These rants are loud, funny, impassioned, and surprisingly coherent given the site of said rants. So it is with a remarkable feeling of deja vu (deja lu?) that I read a blog post from Chris Norris, who manages the vertebrate paleontology collection at the Peabody Museum at Yale. Yesterday I had a drink with Chris, and he began to inveigh against the evils of stolen fossils, explaining how any scientific contact with them whatsoever is like the fruit of the poison tree. Chris has just started launched a blog with the excellent name Prerogative of Harlots, and so, after his rant was over, I said it seemed like ideal blog fodder. And today I see it is. I can even taste the Murphy’s Stout.
Earlier this year I wrote in the New York Times about the remarkable minds of hyenas. The evolution of their brains appears to have followed the same pattern ours have: an increasingly social life drives the expansion of some parts of their brains. This research is the work of Kay Holekamp, a zoologist at Michigan State University who has spent many years observing hyenas in East Africa. And now, continuing a trend that should strike fear into the heart of any science writer, another of my subjects has started a blog of her own. Notes from Kenya chronicles the adventures of Holekamp and her colleagues in their new field season watching spotted hyenas. (The picture above is from a recent spat they had with a lion.) Check it out.
Carl Zimmer writes about science regularly for the New York Times and magazines such as Discover, where he is a contributing editor and columnist.
He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is The Tangled Bank: An Introduction To Evolution. His website is carlzimmer.com and his address is [ blog at carlzimmer dot com ].
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