Science writing I'd pay to read – January 2012

It’s time for December’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. There are two ways to help. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

• Samuel Arbesman, who is killing it over at his new Wired blog. See these posts on the mathematics of cooking and of Lego as examples.
• Greg Gbur (Dr Skyskull) for a great tale about the soldier-stabbing, bandit-negotiating Francois Arago, the world’s most interesting physicist.
• Cassie Willyard on the problem with Patient Zero and false uninformative narratives in public health.
• Greg Downey for probably the best thing you’ll ever read on the problems of evolutionary psychology.
• Emily Willingham for thoroughly debunking an awful Atlantic piece on the imagined “real dangers” of GM crops
• David Dobbs for sublime writing about a painful story: Scott’s Antarctic mission and the lacklustre penguin eggs they collected.
• Kevin Zelnio for telling moving and utterly unique story about how he got into science… and inspiring hundreds of others to do so.
• Maryn McKenna for her typically insightful coverage of the year’s most chilling story so far: the rise of completely drug-resistant TB in India
• Sally Adee for a fascinating tour through the neuroscience of night terrors
• Petra Boynton for an important and topical piece on grieving after stillbirth and our disbelief at reactions we cannot imagine.

Science writing I'd pay to read – December 2011

Science writing I'd pay to read – November 2011

It’s time for November’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. There are two ways to help. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

• David Tuller for this thorough piece on the tangled history of research into chronic fatigue syndrome.
• Shara Yurkiewicz for a beautiful post about a psychiatric interview.
• Carl Zimmer on whether teaching is a uniquely human behaviour, and on Svante Paabo’s remarkable work on Neanderthals
• Virginia Hughes for a personal take on peering into the minds of minimally conscious patients, and a story of the male birth control pill involving five decades, vitamin A, booze, bad jokes, and a potential compound called “Win”.
• Emily Finke for a wonderful post on finding the spectacular in your own backyard
• Steve Silberman for his story about Susan Kare, the iconic icon-designer who gave computing a human face.
• Patrick Clarkin for his methodical look at the links between poverty, inequality, and obesity
• David Dobbs for this clarion call: “I call on science writers everywhere, writing about behavioral genetics: Do Better.”
• Al Dove for his lovely story about how a baby turtle reaches the sea, featuring Robo-turtle and Blake
• Carin Bondar for her great idea of handing HD flip cameras to field biologists, editing them and shooting her own presenter segments.

Science writing I’d pay to read – October 2011

It’s time for October’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. There are two ways to help. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

• Meera Lee Sethi for this fantastic story about internet spider porn, and the dogged passion of scientists
• Tom Holtz for “Love the tyrant, not the hype” – a great piece on T.rex that makes this most familiar of dinosaurs seem fascinatingly new.
• Cassie Willyard for a thoughtful piece on why science writers need to ask dumb questions.
• Erika Check Hayden for an important piece on why sequencing Steve Jobs’ genome couldn’t save his life, and the limits of modern genetics.
• Razib Khan for a thought-provoking post on whether Neanderthals simply lacked leadership.
• Paul Norris for his take on dolphin Curiosity, and whether they seek knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
• Michael Eisen on the “myth of the scientific martyr” and why Daniel Shechtman is not Felisa Wolfe-Simon.
• Jennifer Frazer for a wonderful account of a fountain of life at the bottom of the Dead Sea.
• Mo Costandi for a magical post on whether magicians can teach neuroscientists a few tricks
• Christie Wilcox for a personal account of the science of heartbreak

Science writing I'd pay to read – September 2011

It’s time for September’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. There are two ways to help. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

• Alice Bell for beautifully telling the story of how the fridge got its hum, and what it means for the history of technology. Also for this post on why worrying whether people like science or not is probably the wrong concern.
• Martin Robbins for his analysis of Nautilus, the software that apparently predicted where Osama bin Laden was, but, like Nostradamus, proves to only really be successful in hindsight.
• Frank Swain for a witty and important post on five iconic science images, and why they’re wrong.
• Anne Casselman for her wonderful account of Patrick Keeling, who teaches his students to make their own DIY microscopes.
• Kate Clancy for her eye-opening post on “menotoxins” and how culture biased science towards the acceptance of “menstrual toxins”.
• Sean Carroll for his mind-expanding list of ten things that everyone should know about time
• Eric Michael Johnson for a tour de force essay on the evolution of collective violence.
• Arvind Pillai for his epic primer on Jawless fish and the birth of back-boned animals.
• Jen Gunter for a personal and touching story about her own son Victor, and his struggles with cerebral palsy. A stunning closing line.
• John Hawks, for using his blog to launch a new open-science project where he and colleagues will try and reconstruct 2-million-year-old hominin skin in public view.

Science writing I’d pay to read – August 2011

It’s time for August’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

• Jennifer Ouellette for her joyous paean to yodelling, featuring the Sound of Music, Tibetan monks, the Pavarotti robot, and the “yodellumpet”.
• John Wilkins for his response to the species-counting study that made the headlines: “It’s hardly an objective fact about the world. We may as well be cataloguing toys.”
• Rachel Nuwer for two great posts: one on the threat to rhinos including Irish horn gangs and “shaving alive technology”, and another on the pandemics waiting to happen among Asia’s wildlife markets.
• Erika Check Hayden for her scathing analysis of the IOM’s report on vaccine safety and why we have “lost yet another battle in the war over vaccines.”
• The Neuroskeptic for two great posts on whether sleep give us a chance to defragment out brains, and how random chance acts as our third parent.
• Ann Finkbeiner for a beautiful post on resonance.
• Vaughan Bell for his look at riot psychology in the wake of the UK riots, and why crowd behaviour is a complex area that’s surprisingly poorly researched.
• Jerry Coyne for thoroughly fisking the idea that epigenetics is a big scientific revolution. Says he: “I know scientific revolutions; scientific revolutions are friends of mine… epigenetics is no scientific revolution.”
• Phil Plait for a lovely post on why there have been so many quakes of late, with gems such as “Having a restless planet is a consequence of having a habitable one.”
• Brian Switek for his take on a one of a kind fossil – a fish within an amphibian within a shark, or “the Permian, freshwater lake equivalent of a turducken”

Science writing I’d pay to read – July 2011

It’s time for July’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

• Henry Nicholls for his intriguing piece on the politics of panda censuses, featuring Wen Jiabao and a lot of panda poo.
• Sean Carroll for his increasingly weary three-part post on how the laws underlying physics of everyday life are completely understood, no, really, no REALLY.
• Kevin Zelnio for brilliantly sticking up for science with this post on bear paternity tests, why they were expensive, and why they were worth it.
• Pal MD for his write-up of a “beautiful study” on placebo and asthma
• Dan Jones for this fascinating piece on why we’re more likely to view an act as intentional if we disapprove of it.
• Rob Dunn for a witty and interesting post on why antimicrobial wipes and soaps could be making you (and society) sick
• Rick Macpherson for a stark but balance post on shark-finning
• Daniel Macarthur for his thoughts on why personal genomics is no longer just for white folks.
• Anne Casselman for her evocative post on dancing spiders and why you can spend 37 yrs studying them without scratching the surface.
• Jennifer Frazer for her wonderful take on the almighty prion (“the Rasputin of biology”) and why the humble lichen f**ks them up

Science writing I’d pay to read – June 2011

It’s time for June’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

• “Do you worry that the research you do might be exploited in a way that harms people?” Anna Perman and David Robertson on an important topic, reporting from within a lab that tests how the human body crumples and explodes.
• Stephanie Warren for this illuminating piece about scientists who are looking at the effects of dangerous chemicals by poisoning virtual embryos
• Carl Zimmer on the extended world of animals that shrug off one of the world’s deadliest poisons, and time-travelling sea monkey sex.
• Christie Wilcox asks, “So do we over-vilify invasive species?” and answers, “No, we don’t.”
• Greg Downey with another superb opus, this one on blind people who can use sonar like bats.
• David Winter on placozoans: animals that are sheets
• Maryn McKenna with a great perspective on the recent German E. coli outbreak
• Virginia Hughes for this important piece on what you get when you put a terrorist inside of a brain scanner?
• Kyle McCittirick for this thoughtful piece on prosthetics and why they could do without looking human.
• Matt Novak, ostensibly for the post about jetpack mailmen, but really for the entire Paleofuture blog, which I’ve only just discovered.

And for interest, the tip-jar initiative has raised US$900 since its inception. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Science writing I'd pay to read – May 2011

It’s time for May’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

• An incredible post on how a family quest exposed barriers to open-access science by David Dobbs
• The world’s longest cells in the nervous systems of sauropods – a great example of blogging your own research, by Matt Wedel.
• “For one individual, this breakthrough was… more than 27 years old.” Curing paralysis – again, an amazing personal story by R. Douglas Fields.
• “It’s not a disease. It doesn’t need curing.” Steve Silberman talks to John Robison, a “free-range Aspergian” and best-selling author.
• Plague hits LA: a great two-parter on the bacterium behind the plague, and the man who gave it his name, by Puff the Mutant Dragon.
• Why retractions fall on deaf ears and why it’s important for journalists to get it right first time round, by Vaughan Bell
• A light-hearted tour de force through the cranial nerves, in several parts and growing rapidly, by SciCurious
• Why life is like Lego, and why it matters for the search for aliens, by Lucas Brouwers
• A great three-part series on Alan Turing’s homosexuality & how it was treated as a mental illness, by Romeo Vitelli.
• Levees can make things worse. A great and relevant post on the illusion of flood control, by Anne Jefferson.

And for interest, the tip-jar initiative has raised US$650 over the last two months. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Science writing I’d pay to read – April 2011

It’s time for April’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

• Brian Switek for a wonderful series of posts on primate “grief”, the evolution of mammal ear bones from reptile jaws, the world’s oldest toothache, and why people should stop comparing every dino to T.rex.
• Al Dove for his post on beautifully told account of his own research, involving an amazing mob of 420 feeding whale sharks
• Jennifer Ouellette on the challenge of cryogenics, taking in zombie dogs, antifreeze proteins and, er, Demolition Man.
• Jeremy Yoder on meat-eating geraniums and other sorta-carnivorous plants.
• Craig McClain with a brilliant post drawing parallels between a 1st century Germanic chieftain and a baby coral.
• Christie Wilcox for her thorough critique of a CEO who shot an elephant and bragged about it
• Jonah Lehrer, who made making the psychological case for knowing more about wine
• Jennifer Frazer for a wonderful tribute to the legendary Tom Eisner and a cool tour through the chemical world of insects & plants, featuring bombardier beetles, bolas spiders and more.
• Maryn Mckenna for an eye-opening post on just how hard and expensive it is to stop an outbreak of measles, and the vivid cost of vaccine refusal
• Eric Michael Johnson for his discussion on the allure of gay cavemen and “third gender” people.

And for interest, the tip-jar initiative has raised US$350 over the last two months. Thanks to everyone who contributed.