On the evolution of the science blogosphere

By Andy Extance, ScienceSeeker Editor-in-Chief

In recent months, ScienceSeeker has exorcised many of the dead blogs haunting its list of science sites. Consequently, the number of sites we aggregate has decreased from 2170 when I became editor-in-chief in January 2016 to 2065 now, in May 2017. But rather than finding that decline worrying, I think this exercise has shown how science sites are adapting to a changing blogging environment.

When my predecessor Jordan Gaines Lewis handed the reins over to me, she and fellow editor Jessica Perry Hekman had just completely rebuilt ScienceSeeker. The site had been born in the whirlwind, heat and flash of the ScienceOnline movement, supported, I understand, in part by the revenues from its conferences. That had enabled a professional-looking, highly functional site that cost $40 a month to run.

The ScienceOnline money inevitably ran out, and to start with our editors took turns in paying. Jordan and Jessica then switched to our now almost-free format, hosted on Blogger and powered by the RSS feed reader Inoreader. Not only is this more frugal, Inoreader kindly informs us which feeds are no longer active. Therefore over the last 17 months I have been going through that list, seeking the new homes of blogs that have moved and removing those that have expired. And the experience has provided some interesting insights into trends in the science blogosphere at various levels. The headlines are as follows:

ScienceSeeker Editor's Selections May 15-21 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• Do women really show their emotions more than men?  by Emma Young at British Psychological Society Research Digest
• Shared genetic pathways underlie autism, attention deficit by Bahar Ghoulipour at Spectrum
• Genomes on-line and the Health of Privacy by Effy Vayena and Alessandro Blasimme at Bill of Health
• A classic quantum test could reveal the limits of the human mind by Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist
• 5 Reasons why the 21st century will be the best one ever for astrophysics by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang!
• Hydrothermal vents and the origins of life by Rachel Brazil at Chemistry World
• Old Dog, New Dog: Genetic Map Tracks The Evolution Of Man’s Best Friend by GrrlScientist
• News From Prairie Dog Town by Edmund Blari Bolles at Babel's Dawn
• Tiny Zombie Worms Are the Beavers of the Deep by Sarah Puschmann at Hakai Magazine
• Can We Really Eat Invasive Species into Submission? by Michael Snyder at Scientific American
• ‘Exercise pill’ turns couch potato mice into marathoners by Laura Beil at ScienceNews
• Health damage by air pollution prevented by food supplements? by Eliška Kosová at The GIST 
• 35 Years Of American Deaths by Ella Koeze at FiveThirtyEight
• How Satellite Images Can Confirm Human Rights Abuses by Dina Fine Maron at Scientific American 
• What Indigenous Cultures Can Teach Us About Managing Arctic Change by Emily Gertz at Arctic Deeply
• Why Do We Invent Historical Roots For Modern Science? by Chad Orzel at Forbes
• On the primacy of doubt in an age of illusory certainty by Ash Jogakelar at The Curious Wavefunction

Check back next week for more great picks!

ScienceSeeker Editor's Selections May 8-14 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• What if We Discovered an Alien Civilization Less Advanced Than Our Own? by Corey S. Powell at Out There
• Astronomers Find Water and Weird Clouds on Extrasolar "Warm Neptune" by Mike Wall at Scientific American
• 3.5-billion-year-old fossils hint life evolved in pond, not sea by Alice Klein at New Scientist
• 4 Billion Year Old 'Fossil' Genes May Be Our Secret Weapon Against Infection by Sheryl Wood at Invisiverse
• Metaphors in science: How should we talk about genes? by Rose Hendricks
• Can a good sense of humour protect you from stress? by Christian Jarrett at British Psychological Society Research Digest
• How We Hear (or, An Introduction to Fourier Analysis) at Something Marvelous
• Vaccines, Autism, and Retraction by Neuroskeptic at Discover
• Trading beef for insects—or even chicken—would save a third of arable land by Emma Bryce at Anthropocene
• See how much sugar is packed into 'healthy' food by Sara Chodosh at Popular Science
• Platinum: the almighty cancer killer! by Kayla Matz at SEE: Science for Each and Everyone
• Searching for the keys to immunotherapy success in the tumor microenvironment by John Easton at Science Life
• Gut bacteria linked to stroke by E J Smyth at Sciencemed
• Female mannequins aren't just skinny, they're emaciated by Eric Robinson at Sifting the Evidence
• How Oats Could Save Iowa’s Farmers (and Fight Pollution) by Karen Stillerman at Union of Concerned Scientists
• Can Meadows Rescue the Planet from CO2? by Jane Braxton Little at Scientific American
• These Very Hungry Caterpillars Can Eat Your Plastic Trash by GrrlScientist
• Macro-litter pollution: Plastic shopping bags a risk for marine mammals at The Blue Reporters
• Why Are Bees Disappearing? by Arpit Sharma at Sciencepalooza
• How beekeepers help deadly parasites thrive by Andrew Masterson at Cosmos Magazine
• A Reddit Science Q&A on medical ethnobotany at eScienceCommons
• Rational Arguments for God? by Steven Novella at Neurologica Blog
• Preservar la fertilidad entre los 25 y los 35 años aumenta las tasas de éxito at Noticias de la Ciencia y la Tecnología/Amazings

Check back next week for more great picks!

ScienceSeeker Editor's Selections May 1-7 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• After a Near Sub-2 Marathon, What’s Next? by Alex Hutchinson at Runner's World
• You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you - by Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal 
• What’s the largest planet in the Universe? and  How to prove Einstein’s relativity for less than $100 by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang!
• Images of the Earth at night shine a light on developments across the planet by Jessica Snir at Cosmos Magazine
• How Virtual Reality Could Break America’s Opioid Addiction by Jo Marchant at Mosaic
• Man dreams in colour for first time during cancer radiotherapy by Alice Klein at New Scientist
• Fresh evidence of the power of fig trees to sustain wildlife and restore lost forests by Mike Shanahan at Under the Banyan
Relatively rare tropical trees all agree: avoiding the ‘rain of death’ seems like a good call by Kelle Freel at The Molecular Ecologist
• How does carbon dioxide cause global warming? at A Tang of Science
• Urban Birds Sing Shorter Songs When Traffic Is Loud by GrrlScientist 
• DNA fingerprinting reveals how malaria hides from the immune system by John Easton at ScienceLife
• Scientists Surprised to Find No Two Neurons Are Genetically Alike by Simon Makin at Scientific American
• Webinar: Gender bias in academic publishing by Christian Defeo at Mendeley Blog
• Reproducible practices are the future for early career researchers by Dorothy Bishop at BishopBlog
• If Nautilus is so good, why is it doing so bad? by Vasudevan Mukunth at edmx

Check back next week for more great picks!

ScienceSeeker Editor's Selections April 24-30 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• Speed of poop: Big or small, mammals drop a deuce in ~12 secs, study finds by Beth Mole at Ars Technica
• Is Eating Late Bad for Your Heart? by Monica Reinagel at Scientific American
• Fasting against diabetes by Rosa García-Verdugo at Mapping Ignorance
• Is screen time a risk factor for ADHD?  by Paul Whiteley at Questioning Answers 
• 60 Years of Starstuff by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang! 
• The Crazy Scale of Human Carbon Emission by Caleb Scharf at Life, Unbounded
• Sixty-four years later: How Watson and Crick did it by Ash Jogalekar at The Curious Wavefunction
• Who’s Who on Science Twitter and Who Counts? by Hilda Bastian at Absolutely Maybe
• How a dolphin eats an octopus without dying by Sarah Zielinski at Wild Things
• Detoxing the Ocean by Michael Allen at Hakai Magazine
• Plants can hear water. Could noise pollution interfere? by Brandon Keim at Anthropocene
• Fundamental Theorems of Evolution by Brad Duthie at Phylo-Eco-Geo-Evo Journal Club
• Mapping the canine genome reveals origin of dog breeds by Andrew Masterson at Cosmos
• Cyber Security for the Internet of Things Is Crucial by Megan Ray Nichols at Schooled By Science
• Preprint server bioRxiv gets boost from Facebook billionaire by Erica Check Hayden at Spectrum 
• What children seeking asylum want adults to know by Nancy Bazilchuk at ScienceNordic
• Let Them Make My Cake: Exporting Burden, Importing Convenience in the Externalization Society by Jalees Rehman at The Next Regeneration
• Trump appoints Charmaine Yoest, our index Aunt Lydia, to Health and Human Services by Jen Gunter
• ¿Hay diferencias en la composición de un producto transgénico y uno convencional? by David Castro at Expresión Genética

Check back next week for more great picks!