Some will be scholarly, crusading or probing, others whimsical or funny, but each flavor will reveal something about how its creator ticks. As Robert Krulwich, NPR’s science correspondent and keynote speaker at ScienceOnline 2011, said in an interview: “You can’t help yourself. You ask the question that your soul asks.”

Unlike the more than 200 registered bloggers at ScienceOnline 2011 who mingled Jan. 13 to Jan. 16 in Research Triangle Park, Krulwich doesn’t blog. But his Radio Lab podcasts and Nova videos represented one flavor. Darlene Cavalier, Mary Canady and Brian Malow provided distinctly different flavors. All four talked to Science in the Triangle about their approach. (Watch Krulwich’s interview here.)

Cavalier is a former Disney Publishing executive who outed herself as a former Philadelphia 76s cheerleader to advocate for science literacy. She started Science Cheearleader.com and helps match people without a hard science background with scientists who need help with research such as keeping records of birds’ migratory patterns, taking water samples or measuring the amount of snow fallen.

Watch Cavalier talk about her citizen scientist flavor:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Canady is a biochemistry Ph.D. who switched from bench science to marketing. In 2008, she started Comprendia.com, a virtual bioscience consulting group in San Diego and began thinking about whether marketing and science blogging can mix.

“We’re forging new trails here and need to be creative in thinking about these new relationships – think outside the box, as trite as it may sound,” she said during a ScienceOnline 2011 session.

The iron curtain between advertisement and content is best handled with care as last year’s Pepsigate at Scienceblogs.com showed. More than 20 contributors pulled out after postings by Pepsi scientists were to be published on the first-of-its-kind science blogging network.

But what about scientists posting on corporate blogs, companies sponsoring ask-an-expert forums and businesses underwriting independent blogs?

Here is Canady’s take on the business flavor:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Malow is a professional stand-up comedian with a liberal arts degree who is feeling his way into science comedy.

A voracious reader who is intrigued by astronomy, physics and evolution, he started adding jokes about particles, Star Wars and creationism to his repertoire a few years ago.

He said he wasn’t hired to perform at ScienceOnline 2011 but pulled together an entire show just hours before volunteering to go on stage.

Watch an uncut interview with Malow about his taste of fun:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a first-time attendee and representative of Science in the Triangle, I divided my time between chasing down interviewees and attending panels, which were organized by participants on an online wiki.

One of those interviewees, Katie Mosher of NC Sea Grant, told me that she’d observed a coming together of science blogging and science journalism in the three years since she’d started attending ScienceOnline. More journalists are using the blog form either to replace or to supplement their print or broadcast stories, she said, some of them writing in traditional journalistic objective form and some of them adopting a point of view. Some of those journalists were present at the conference, just as she sees bloggers now attending conferences hosted by organizations like the National Association of Science Writers.

But journalists appeared to be outnumbered at the conference by scientists who blog (or tweet, or both). As a professional writer who frequently covers science, I should perhaps see these scientist-bloggers as competition. Not at all. To me, they are representative of a welcome trend in academics to communicate with the public about scientific findings and (sometimes controversially) the public policy implications of these findings. A scientist-blogger who writes well (perhaps one who attended the panel by Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong on avoiding obfuscation in science writing) and who knows how to attract an audience can have an immediate impact on public understanding of breaking news, as has been the case with the scientists at Deep-Sea News who covered science surrounding the Gulf oil spill. (Bora Zivkovic explains why scientists are such good explainers.)

A scientist-blogger takes some professional risks. Although I was unable to attend “Perils of Blogging as a Woman under a Real Name,” panelist Kate Clancy provides a detailed writeup here, which alludes to the skepticism with which academic colleagues and tenure and promotion panels view blogging and similar “soft” activities.

A scientist-blogger has to deal with certain downsides of being an online presence, most notably “cranks . . . who come onto our sites and leave comments that foment dissension rather than productive commentary,” according to Rick MacPherson, interim executive director and conservation programs director at the Coral Reef Alliance. It happens wherever evolution or climate change are discussed, he said, and he is the target for negative comments every time he writes or is interviewed about the role of climate change in sea level rise and ocean acidification, both threats to coral reefs.

According to MacPherson, the negative commenters are evidence that the general public doesn’t understand the evidence-based nature of science. “People don’t understand how science works,” he said. “It’s not a democratic process. . . . not opinions.”

His sentiments were echoed in “Lessons from Climategate” by panelist Chris Mooney, coauthor of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, who listed these depressing statistics:

• only 18 percent of Americans know a scientist
• just 13 percent follow science and technology news
• 44 percent can’t name a scientific role model; those who can most frequently name Albert Einstein, Al Gore, and Bill Gates, two of whom are not scientists
• in every five hours of cable news, just one minute is devoted to science and technology

According to Mooney, the situation “is ripe for climate skeptics; they are well-trained, skilled communicators who exploit lack of public knowledge and are willing to fight hard in ways climate scientists are not.” His co-panelist Josh Rosenau, who works to defend the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education, said that the language of the attacks against climate science has an eerie parallel in the attacks against evolution. “For 90 years we’ve been fighting same battle,” he said. “Public opinion has not moved. If that happens to climate change we are doomed.”

Mooney and Rosenau were joined on the panel by Thomas C. Peterson, chief scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville. Peterson was one of the climate scientists whose emails were hacked and published just a few weeks before the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit. Although his role in the affair was minor, he was excoriated in blogs (Peterson reminds us that some “science” blogs are unsound scientifically), subjected to harassing calls and emails, and asked by a congressman to produce all emails on the topic (which he did, and which vindicated him). Yet he was still subsequently elected by his peers to be president of the World Meteorological Association’s Commission for Climatology. Clearly, in his professional circles, he is a rock star even if some of the public doesn’t think so.

For Peterson and his co-panelists, the implication is clearly that the public doesn’t understand scientists the way scientists do. Mooney said that the climate emails were taken out of context by people who don’t understand science or scientists. His solution: train “deadly ninjas of science communication”–people who can frame the message and convey science clearly to different constituencies. He wants good communicators to claim the vacancies created when CNN dumped its entire science reporting unit and when daily newspapers gradually reduced their science coverage.

That’s a space that good scientist-bloggers can occupy alongside professional writers: reporting on science from the trenches, bringing scientific research alive, demystifying the scientific method, and unveiling the wealth of unsound science out there.

Notes:

Read my colleague Sabine Vollmer’s post on credibility in science blogging here.

A great resource for finding science blogs is scienceblogging.org.

Two sessions on Saturday and one on Sunday addressed the quality of online science writing and ethics standards. Two touched on the fact that while blogs are rarely edited, posts published on them can be difficult to distinguish from edited content published in magazines and newspapers and without an editor, mistakes and sloppiness can happen. In the third session, journalistic standards of separating advertisement and content took center stage.

Virginia Hughes, the former community manager of ScienceBlogs and a panelist in the “Science Journalism Online: Better, or Merely Different” session, suggested labeling blogs. Ed Yong, a blogger for Discover Magazine and a panelist at the “Blogs, Bloggers and Boundaries?” session, said a blogger writing for a larger audience encounters more boundaries to get scientific information across and standards help to break down those boundaries.

OK. So what if there was a rating system for blogs, sort of a Good Blogging seal of approval to attract a wider, more general audience from traditional media – particularly from the many regional newspapers that have eliminated local science reporting. What if such a rating system would clearly identify blogs and rate how credible their information is?

The first question that arises is who would define the standards. The second question is who would apply them. Once both questions are answered, science blogging may be more defined, but it would also lose some of the vibrancy that comes from the freedom of not having an editor, of being able to write about the most obscure or the most mundane in any conceivable format.

Technology allows everybody to blog, to say his or her piece without having to pay printing costs. This offers the opportunity to depose authorities who speak from up high.

Sure, some blog posts will be inscrutable, wrong or wrong-headed. But others will be fantastic experiments of creativity. Some of them may even lead us to a way to write about science and make a living doing it.

It is premature to want to define science blogging while the future of online communication is far from clear.

Online science writing must remain as big a tent as possible, avoid institutionalization and leave judgment calls about quality and credibility to the audience.

What would help the audience do that, is more transparency – who the blogger is, where he or she is coming from, links to sources and disclosures of potential conflicts of interest.

Kroll grew up on a neighborhood perched on a hill that afforded a direct view of the Roche tower in Nutley, New Jersey. Growing up looking at the Roche tower every day lead him to take an interest in pharmacology and the drug industry. He went to college as a first generation student and majored in Toxicology at Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, following his dream of someday being able to help others by working in that same tower.

Throughout his career, Kroll kept in mind that knowledge can be used inclusively or exclusively. He wanted to use his knowledge of pharmacology to help regular people navigate the drugs that they were taking, but wasn’t very prepared for the discovery that science could be a profession so isolated from the public at large. He starting blogging as an outlet for his desire to educate the wider public on drugs, supplements, and pharmacology in general. Kroll recently
celebrated his fifth year of blogging in December 2010, blogging for ScienceBlogs, the American Chemical Society’s CENtral Science, and for PLoS Blogs over the years.

The path of Kroll’s educational and musical career intersect at many points in his life. He started playing guitar at the age of fourteen as a way to escape being labeled as a “real dork in high school.” However, the release of The Police’s Outlandos D’Amour and Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp lead him to an appreciation of the bass, which he switched to a year after picking up the guitar. This step proved to be successful as he went on to play bass in his first band with his high school girlfriend, his high school friend, his guidance counselor, and his high school history teacher. Kroll cites his history teacher as being a huge influence on getting him interested in the history of social injustice and specifically the history of science. His first band played bars and clubs around town throughout Kroll’s high school years.

In college, he played mostly solo but would occasionally play with his old high school band while visiting home. Around the time he was finishing college, Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s “Southern Accents” was released and proved to be yet another pivotal album in his life. This Tom Petty album release was right around the time of his acceptance into a pharmacology doctorate program at the University of Florida in Gainesville, the hometown of the Heartbreakers. Tom Rowe, his advisor at UF, was supportive of a work/life balance, and this freedom allowed him to play in a U2 tribute band for two years in graduate school.

After finishing his Ph.D., he landed an offer for a postdoc position at Roche, the original setting of his dream of working in pharmacology. He was literally within days of accepting when he got offered a position at the University of Colorado in Denver. He ended up taking the position in Denver instead, where he worked on the transcriptional regulation of the CREB protein and a shortly afterward went on to land an Assistant Professor position in the School of Pharmacology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

The move to Denver proved to be fortuitous to his musical life as well. One day he was typing up an abstract in the main office of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Diabetes at the Univ of Colorado Health Sciences Center when a endocrinology fellow walked in to answer a page for a gig he was playing later that evening. Kroll struck up a conversation, mentioning that he was a bass player, and got invited to jam with Dan Bessesen, and his bandmate, Jay Reusch, a cardiologist whose wife was also an endocrinology fellow. These jam sessions evolved into Dogs in the Yard, an adult alternative band that lasted for eleven years, from 1990 – 2001. They played gigs at the medical center, fundraisers, and even the endocrine department Christmas party. They released two CDs, one in 1997 entitled “Sunday Afternoon” and one in 2001, “Til the Summer Fades Away.” About eight years into the band, EMI called and offered them a move to LA to pursue the possibility of a record deal. But as all of the people in the band had work and family obligations, they decided to turn it down.

Eleven years is an ancient time in band years, but all good things must come to an end. Kroll left Dogs in the Yard after he met his now-wife at a cancer research conference in Colorado. She was a Duke oncology physician-scientist who lead him to doing a sabbatical at Duke that eventually lead to a job offer in the North Carolina Research Triangle at RTI International. Despite the loss of the band, he continued his musical career with other scientists, playing with
Nick Oberlies, a chemistry postdoc, scientific collaborator at RTI, and DJ at Duke University station WXDU. He also played with Cole Guerra, a psychology graduate student at Duke who Kroll contacted after reading an article featuring him in the local Triangle Independent Weekly. Kroll joined his band on bass for shows at Cafe Driade and Local 506 in Chapel Hill. However, at RTI he missed the joy of teaching students and moved to take a professorship at North
Carolina Central University in Durham.

Kroll has continued to keep in touch with music at NCCU, playing the annual Faculty Talent Show and working on solo projects. Lately, he’s been writing songs under his own name in preparation to record a solo album called “From Denver to Durham.” The namesake of his album comes from the fact that both cities have an interstate exit numbered 284 that leads to the international airport, a testament to the myriad levels of interconnectivity in both his scientific and musical career.

At the BlogTogether bash in Durham in October, he debuted a song called “Minister of the Ether” that pays tribute to Anton Zuiker in celebration of his 10th year of blogging and to all his work in the blogging community. Check out an exclusive video below of Kroll giving an acoustic performance of the song under the bull statue in Durham’s city center.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today, I asked Kelly Chi to answer a few questions.

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m a freelance science writer based in Cary, North Carolina, but I spent most of my life thinking that I would one day become a scientist. It turns out that I am terrible at experiments. Although I realized this during my first year of graduate school, I kept going – for three years on the PhD track, stubbornly – with the thought that one day it wouldn’t matter that my hands shake during rat brain surgery. And I could be a professor, think of new experiments, write papers and teach.

During graduate school, I started writing for the college newspaper and realized that I loved writing about science. Short-term deadlines fit me perfectly, I also learned. So I left my PhD, got a master’s and started the science and medical journalism program at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2006.

Leaving my PhD was really difficult for me, not only because I hate the idea of quitting but because it seemed risky to pursue an entirely new career path. But since that time, I’ve learned that there are a whole bunch of writers and editors out there who are also just like me.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I wish that freelancing offered more of a career trajectory, but in the past several years I have focused on getting (and keeping) clients and trying different sorts of writing and editing.

While pursuing a master’s at UNC, for example, I worked with the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center on an exhibit for kids called Zoom In, which tackled diverse topics like cystic fibrosis and outer space. The best part of this project was working with a team of educators and designers. We got paid to talk about mucus– who wouldn’t love that?

Last year, I got my first long-ish feature, ‘Disappearing before Dawn,’ published in The Scientist magazine. That became one of the most popular articles on the website in 2009, and that’s probably because you linked to it, Bora. In 2009, I also wrote a small book that I refuse to call a booklet for London-based NGO International Institute for Environment and Development that appeared at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Besides the usual freelancing, I’ve been taken a position at Medscape Medical Students as a freelance clinical editor. My goal, for the next six months, will be to help build the website’s blogs, columns and discussions. This content will, I hope, help medical students survive rotations and choose their specialties.

I also manage editorial content for the Amgen Scholars Program website. It’s funded by the Amgen Foundation, and the program gives undergraduates the chance to do scientific research at one of more than 10 host universities across the U.S. and Europe. As part of this work, which is through my client Faculty of 1000, I encourage students to blog about their research experiences in the Program’s private online community. I’ve been able to meet and interact with some really bright and talented undergraduates. These kids are great. They sometimes make me feel old, but that’s okay.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Like many of my writer friends and colleagues, I care about making science accessible to people. Most of my work is geared for somewhat specialized audiences, like physicians or scientists or students, but these folks are everyday people in many ways. I try to assume that they won’t have the time or willpower to unpack a mess of jargon. That said, I like knowledge for its own sake, so sometimes jargon will nerdily make its way into my writing. I’m lucky to have patient editors who remind me to fish it out.

Related to the Amgen Scholars and Medscape Medical Students work I’m doing, I am also deeply interested in building online communities and helping make them better somehow. With this goal in mind, I plan to attend ScienceOnline 2011 and absorb as much as I can. Because building communities is not easy, and I need all the help I can get.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I have to admit that I spend more time finding and encouraging others to blog than I do blogging. Motivated by my own hypocrisy, I started a website and attached a blog to it. Besides posting and linking to my own articles, I hope to find time to write about science and health tidbits that interest me. Luckily, no one reads my blog yet (except for my mother and my friend Penny), so no pressure.

I do use Twitter and Facebook, but I find myself posting for different audiences. On Facebook, it’s my family and friends. On Twitter, it’s my colleagues and people who are too interesting to ignore. Most of this online activity is a net positive, I’d say, because it has given me story ideas and the ability to procrastinate in the most productive way possible.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, because it makes me feel technologically challenged, but for me the coolest part about the conference was the undercurrent of chatter on the #scio10 Twitter feed. Attendees used Twitter to sum up the presentations, ask questions, make wisecracks and agree or disagree with the presenters. All in real time. I have to admit that before this conference I avoided Twitter because I thought of it as a giant time suck. Now I think of it as not only not a time suck but, at least in a conference setting, as a way to understand the same presentation through someone else’s more experienced eyes — like internet-o-vision. The experience was kind of a revelation for me. Twitter’s also great for networking: when I started tuning into the conference-related tweets, I got introduced to many attendees in a short amount of time.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. And I’ll see you in January!

Today, I asked Marla Broadfoot to answer a few questions.

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I live in a big old farmhouse in Wendell, a little town east of Raleigh. My husband’s great great great grandfather Dr. Henry Avera built it in 1870-something, so the house has been in the family for nine generations. I’m more of a city girl myself, but it has grown on me, high ceilings, cold winters, busted plumbing, mice, and all. I love doing my interviews from my antique desk, looking out at our resident groundhog as she suns herself in the yard. It’s not such a bad place to muse and write.

I was a research scientist before I was a writer. I had always thought I wanted to be a scientist, until I was one. The way it was laid out in textbooks, science was a beautiful and surprisingly simple thing. But once I delved deeper into the discipline, doing research of my own, I found that nothing was as simple as it seemed. Take that elegant DNA double helix that Watson and Crick first described. It doesn’t always look that way – often it is twisted like a rope, and sometimes it is completely reversed!

Not that I detest complex topics – actually, some of my favorite things to write about are the most basic of basic sciences, which are hardly ever simple. But I did feel like every time I attempted some feat at the bench, the complexities of the science made it take ten times longer than I thought it should. Some people embrace those complications, delving into every detail of the problem they are working on. But I was just too impatient for that. I wanted answers, and I wanted them right away.

I found myself enjoying reading up on the science, presenting the science and writing about the science more than doing the science. I dabbled a bit in science writing, creating a couple of pieces for American Scientist and Endeavors, the research magazine at UNC, where I was in graduate school. I enjoyed the writing immensely, but wasn’t sure I was willing to jump off the track that I had laid out for myself so many years before. So I applied for a very competitive fellowship in clinical molecular genetics at the National Human Genome Research Institute. There was only one spot available, so I figured if I got it that meant I should stick with research; if I didn’t, then clearly writing was my new path. Well, I got it, and once I got over the boost to my ego, I realized I would have to keep doing research. I loved the fellowship, even though there was a huge learning curve as I was one of only a few PhDs in a group of MDs. And then there was that week where I thought I had Marfan syndrome (which Abraham Lincoln may have had) because I could reach around my back with one arm and touch my belly button (I learned in class that was one of the signs of the disease). Turned out it was just part of the hypochondria that sets in after reading up on clinical disorders for hours at a time.

But the research still frustrated me, so I finally admitted to myself (and my mentor) that I was going to take the leap and leave research altogether. I finished my fellowship, passed the boards (a qualification I never used) and let my country mouse of a husband “drag” me down to this quirky old home. I wrote for Duke full-time for a little over a year, most of which it seems I spent pregnant, and then left to pursue freelancing and motherhood. Now I spend my time switching between two completely different worlds: one, where I am often alone on my computer translating scientific jargon and the other, where I am being jumped upon by one little body or another. Both jobs are fun and challenging, though in completely contradictory ways.

I love the concrete nature of writing. I am no longer working with molecules too tiny for the eye to see – I’m manipulating words that I can see transform into something real and telling right there on the page. I love it that I don’t have to hear about the failures or pitfalls of science – no colony contamination or troubleshooting PCR conditions make it into my articles. Because of my stint in research, I have a strong admiration for scientists and the dedication it takes to succeed in the discipline. I also think I can be even more critical of the work I report on because I know how science is done, how it can be manipulated even unintentionally, and how it is ever changing.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

Over the last year and a half I have been working on a series on Women in Science for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Many women go into science, but just like me, leave around the time of starting their own lab. Russ Campbell at the BWF, God bless him, gave me free reign to completely delve into the problem of why more women don’t make it to the high ranking positions in academia. I pored over the literature and talked with about twenty researchers at all different stages of their careers. The result was a four-part series on a variety of topics from equity issues to mentoring to the biological clock to institutional biases. I found that outright discrimination may be mostly in the past, but subtle biases still exist, and accumulate over time, putting women at a disadvantage for awards, tenure and promotions. And men aren’t solely to blame – women and men alike tend to undervalue the contributions of female scientists. So we may have come a long way, baby, but there is a long way yet to go. Russ and I are putting the four articles and just as much supplemental material into a mini-novella of sorts that we are going to distribute nationally to continue to raise awareness about the issue.

I have also become interested in the idea of translational medicine. According to one statistic, it takes about 17 years to turn a mere 14 percent of research findings into changes in care that benefit patients. To me, that just seems too little too late. When I was in graduate school, I discovered a sort of cure for beta-thalassemia, a Mediterranean blood disorder. Essentially, I obliterated the disease in a Petri dish, published my papers, and then graduated. Patients were contacting me to find out when the treatment would reach them, and all I could see were the nearly insurmountable steps before it would ever get there. I have been writing a number of articles about a large national effort underway to cut down on those steps, and to make those that must remain at least a little less daunting. Right now I think the public is hungry to see some return on their investment. I read somewhere that it is the National Institutes of “Health,” not the National Institutes of “Scientific Publications.” Clearly the bar for success as a scientist has to change.

Another thing I have particularly enjoyed doing is creating an “Ask a scientist” series for the SciTech page of the Charlotte Observer and News & Observer. The series explores relatively basic questions that many of us may have heard about but only have enough knowledge to be dangerous. Topics like “What is ozone?,” “How does chemotherapy work?,” and “Why does Thanksgiving dinner make us sleepy?” The scientists I have talked to really revel in the opportunity to revisit old topics and allay some common misconceptions about science. A lot of the questions are inspired by my kids, who like all kids are innately curious and always want to know more. Plus I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from adult readers, asking for more details and suggesting new topics.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Honestly, most of my time is taken up by my two little rugrats, Marilyn age 4 and Viola “Vi” age 2. I remember when Vi was just a baby I flew to Seattle to cover a meeting for aids2031, a group of all these brilliant researchers from around the world who were trying to cure HIV. I was immersed in highly technical discussions and worked 12 hour days practically every day that week. Yet I got more rest than I had in a long, long time. Being a parent is definitely the most exhausting thing I have ever done. Personally, I find writing more exhilarating than exhausting. I know it sounds trite, but sometimes it really feels like a hobby I get paid to do. I frankly don’t have time for any other hobbies – a little yoga, a little reading, but if I have free time, I write, because that is what I love to do. So I guess with regard to my career, my goals are quite simple. To keep getting paid to do what I love to do, for people to read my work, and for it to make them think, perhaps even look at the world a little differently than they did before. But I guess when it comes to what matters most in my life, it is that I raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids. Let them save the world.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Practically every major issue facing the world today – global warming, the economic crisis, universal health care – has some aspect of science within it and will likely require the critical thinking and technological advances of science to solve. I personally think that science communication is an excellent vehicle to educate the public, not necessarily so that everyone can name the four bases of DNA, but more so that people can see how science can change their lives. I have always thought science was incredibly cool, and I want to impart that same excitement to those around me. My focus is on biomedical research, so I am constantly trying to explain how even the most basic research can have far-reaching implications (yes, I think fruit fly studies in France are worthwhile). But I also think it is important not to make false promises about the speed with which science is likely to progress or blow the effects of small studies out of proportion, no matter how sexy the question being tackled. That is a risk that has increased as so many dedicated science reporters have been cut from staff rooms, but hopefully the burgeoning number of independents reviewing and writing about science online can pick up the slack.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I read fellow NASW member Tabitha Powledge’s blog break-down every week. I use Twitter mainly to pick up on interesting topics in science and science journalism that I might have missed through (more) traditional channels. And I use Facebook almost entirely to share the cute or horrifying things my kids did that day. I enjoy having social media in my life, especially considering that on the days when I am working it can be the only social interaction I get. But I don’t dedicate a lot of my time to it – I mostly lurk on the sites and read a little, rarely posting myself.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I didn’t get a chance to attend many of the sessions, so I hope I will have the opportunity to go to more of them this year. I enjoyed hearing Michael Specter talk, particularly the discussion afterwards on how a journalist knows when they have talked to enough experts and done enough research to do a particular story justice. I have grappled with that same question myself, sometimes wondering if I should include the other side in a story even when that other side represents a small minority of scientific opinion. I recall one of the participants saying that scientists do the same thing as journalists, accumulating data until they think a story is complete and then submitting it to a particular academic journal. I guess scientists and journalists aren’t all that different, we just have to use our best judgment in how we present our work and the work of others.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope you willl be there again next January.

First, on Wednesday October 6th at 7:30 pm, Maryn will be reading at my most favourite bookstore in the world – Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. I’ll be there.

Then, next day, on Thursday October 7th at 7:00 pm, she will be going over to Durham to read/sign at The Regulator Bookshop. I may try to come to that again.

Join us if you are in town for one or the other or both events!

The aim of the book is twofold: first, to showcase the quality of science blogging to the audience that does not read blogs and perhaps has a negative opinion of blogs due to the anti-blog propaganda in the mainstream media, and second, to build and strengthen the science blogging community.

The idea for the compilation came from a discussion between Anton Zuiker and a representative of the Raleigh-based online book publisher Lulu.com. They were trying to find a fun and useful way for the company to sponsor the first ScienceOnline conference (then called Triangle Science Blogging Conference). As it was late December 2006 there were only about four weeks left until the conference, so they thought there was not sufficient time to collect and publish such a book and have it ready in time for the meeting.

But I thought it could be done if the project was completely crowdsourced. I posted a call for submissions on my blog and e-mailed hundreds of science bloggers asking them to recommend either their own or other people’s best posts which they promptly did. I then asked several science blogging friends to help me read and evaluate all the entries. This narrowed the field from 218 submissions down to 62. Out of those 62 finalists, I picked 50 essays, making sure that different areas of science, as well as different formats and styles, were represented in the final version. I contacted the authors and, with huge help from Anton Zuiker on the technical side of things, put the book together and had it published just in time for the first Conference. You can buy the first edition here.

The book was an instant success – both among the bloggers and in reviews published in several media outlets and journals (including in Nature). It became obvious that this had to become an annual project. But it was also obvious that this project is too big for one person to handle alone.

Thus, for the second anthology, I asked Reed Cartwright to act as the 2007 guest editor. The number of entries doubled, so his help in setting up the technology for submission, judging and sorting the entries was invaluable. His technical skills also made the book look much better. Thus, the second book was born. You can buy it here.

In 2008, guest editor Jennifer Rohn brought her editorial skills (as well as skills in persuading several other people to help) to produce an even more professionally edited and prettier book – you can find it here.

For the 2009 edition, guest editor SciCurious refined the judging method further and the result was, again, a great improvement. You can see it for yourself here.

The work on the 2010 book is in progress. The guest editor is Jason Goldman. The Submission form is here and the instructions for submitting are here. You can buy all four annual collections here and you can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.

I post the full updated listing of all the submissions every Monday morning. This serves as a reminder for bloggers to submit their (and other people’s) posts, and to some extent prevents duplicate entries. But most importantly, it presents a growing listing of some of the most exciting work on science blogs. This is a weekly post where bloggers can discover each other and discover blogs they were not previously aware of. Thus it is also a promotion for all the bloggers involved.

The complete transparency of the process and the community involvement in the entire project are the biggest strength of it. Everyone in the science blogging world feels a little bit of pride in it and a little bit of ownership in it. Competition is tough, but everyone is very sportman-like when the final winners are announced in late December or early January, everyone congratulates the winners and everyone helps promote the book to their friends and families. Thus the project serves both as a glue for the community and as a means for the community to promote itself to the people outside of it, including people who are not online at all. Thus both the science and the world of blogging gain new readers from the project.

The conference was organized by Michele McLellan (Twitter), a Reynolds Fellow, and Jay Rosen (Twitter), professor of journalism at NYU.

For various reasons (mostly personal and financial) I had to miss a number of interesting conferences this year, from Lindau Nobel meeting, through Open Summit in Berkeley, to Science Online London, but this meeting was worth the scramble and a tight-budget travel. Out of 120 participants, the only one I have met before in real life was Jay Rosen. But I knew a number of others from their online work – on Twitter, their blogs, their news-sites and in case of Scott Rosenberg (Twitter) also his excellent book which I keep recommending to everyone who is interested in blogs.

The first thing I did when I arrived was edit my name-tag. I crossed off “PLoS” and in its place wrote in big black letters ScienceInTheTriangle.com – the local, niche news-site we have been developing over the past three years or so. What we are doing with the site and our experiences with developing it were topics of interest for many of the people I met and talked to at the conference.

But more important for me at this conference was what I could learn from the experiences of others. While there was some emphasis on making money and creative new ways of advertising (some of which made me slightly uneasy with some blurring of the ed/ad barrier, post #PepsiGate), much of the discussion was about engagement – working with (and not for or to) a community, motivating people in the community to contribute stories (and not just text, but also images, audio, video, data, etc.) and engage with the other people on the site. I have picked up (almost by osmosis) some ideas that I think I can modify and then test for the future, both at ScienceInTheTriangle.com and in my future work building a science blogging network at Scientific American.

Probably the most useful break-away session for me was the one on Engagement, expertly moderated by David Kohn (Twitter) of Spot.us. About 30 people in the room exchanged their experiences – what they did to engage their local communities, what worked, and most importantly what were their biggest failures (and why, with 20-20 hindsight, were those things failures).

The discussion also used the example of Spot.us-funded reporting from the Pacific Garbage patch by Lindsey Hoshaw which stirred quite a lot of discussion in the media and blogs afterwards – Lindsey collected some of the key links here and here and she came and co-moderated an important session about this kind of journalism at ScienceOnline2010.

It is interesting to ponder why Lindsey’s liveblogging of her voyage was so popular, and so trustworthy. The hyperlocal news-sites are generally more trusted than traditional metro or national media, but I guess it has something to do with the ability of neighbors in the community to verify the information easily – it’s in their neighborhoods, involving their neighbors. They immediately spot errors.

The information coming from a far-away NYC or DC or Iraq, on the other hand, is not as easily verifiable, and the media has been caught in grievous errors so many times before, the trust is quickly eroding.

So why was Lindsey trusted? Jay Rosen suggests that this is because she was “one of us”, our representative eyes and ears in a place (the research vessel) that most of us could not be. She was a people’s reporter, funded by the people and read by the people.

The only moment when she (temporarily) lost our trust was when she published her article in New York Times – a suspect place to begin with, but also quickly shown to have been editorially watered down to the point of containing several factual errors. Even her story demonstrated how the traditional media is not (and probably should not be) trusted.

At the end of the energizing conference (flawlessly organized and executed as a true ‘Unconference’) the popular sentiment is that this should become an annual event. I am adding my vote to this choir as well – this was one of the most useful meetings to me lately as I met many new people and learned a lot about what they do to reboot journalism. In this world of completely rethinking and redesigning media, this was a collection of the most cutting-edge thinkers and doers. If there is one next year, I’ll be back.

For the coverage by other participants, see the official Block By Block Blog and dig through the tweets.

I am not going to recap what happened, as Tyler Dukes, Ross Maloney and Maria Gontaruk did it masterfully last week. I want to think a little bit more about Mythbusters and what their show means in the ecosystem of science media and communication.

I assume that many will agree that the goal of science communication is not just to highlight the latest scientific findings, but also to educate the population about science: what it is, how it works, and to what extent should scientists be trusted. In a democratic society in which science is trusted, the population drives their leaders to adopt reality-based policy solutions to problems. Which is a Good Thing, I hope you agree.

There is an idea out there that science needs rock stars. The name bandied about as an example is usually Carl Sagan who seems to be beloved and deified by people of certain age, geography and socio-economic status. Thus the question is often posed as “How do we get a new Carl Sagan?”.

But the media ecosystem is completely different today in comparison to the 1970s when Sagan and some others were on TV. Thus the question is erroneous to begin with. We have many, many science communicators who are much better than Sagan ever was. But in the new media ecosystem, they are relegated to the “pull media” instead of the “push media“. They are all over the places visited by people who are already interested in science, but are effectively barred from the media with broad reach and wide audience.

So, we need to rethink our question. It is not “who can be the next Carl Sagan?” but “what works in today’s media ecosystem?”. We can try to get scientists onto TV, an uphill battle against the media houses, but we can also see what existing and popular shows already do a good job at pursing our goals: how science works, and why empiricism wins the day.

And “what works in today’s media ecosystem”, like it or not, is Mythbusters.

Sagan, Attenborough, Cousteau, Bellamy and others were scientists. Adam and Jamie are not – at least in the sense of not having formal education and degrees in science. Jamie grew up on a farm, and both of them went through a variety of jobs, mostly manual work, that required them to use ingenuity and come up with hands-on solutions to immediate problems in their work. Their life experience turned them into de facto scientists. If you agree that science is a refined and regimented common sense, Adam and Jamie have developed it to the maximum that an informal training can get one to. On one hand, they are a return to the era of Victorian gentlemen naturalists when doing science did not require a PhD in science – everyone could do it. On the other hand, they are the modern Citizen Scientists – where again, doing science does not require a PhD in science – everyone can do it.

One thing that Jamie and Adam stress is that their show is unlike any of the others we like to mention – they are not “demonstrations” or narrated visuals of the wonders of nature. They are experiments, answering real questions with real work. They start with a question and do not know what the final answer will be – and that is the key: their audiences are going with them for the ride knowing that this is not a high school science lab where answers are already known in advance. It is a journey that the audience takes together with Adam and Jamie.

Sure, the purists may object to some aspects of the methodology of their experiments – a sample size of one, for example – but Mythbusters is not a school program, it is a TV show, thus entertainment. Many of the tests they do are too big and expensive to be done more than once so a sample size of one is better than a sample size of zero (yes, I have seen wonderful N=1 papers in big journals, e.g., dissection of a whale tongue showing the counter-current arrangement of blood vessels published in Science – would you as a reviewer insist they kill a few more whales to up their sample sizes?).

There was a show, though, that was somewhat of a precursor to Mythbusters. It was Don’t Ask Me which ran on ITV (and most of Europe) back in the 1970s, at the same time when Sagan and others had their heyday.

I asked Jamie and Adam if they ever saw that show and they didn’t.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, with so many decades in-between, there are some big difference between the shows, but as I mentioned, the show was just a precursor, a seed of an idea, that years later resulted in a full-blown realization of that idea in Mytbusters. For one, Don’t Ask Me was filmed inside the studio, with a very small budget. There was no way they could do things that require a lot of space and money, or that involved huge explosions. It was obviously and transparently ‘fake’ – there is no way an audience member could stand up with a question and immediately have it answered with all the tools and props ready to go in the studio within seconds – that was obviously staged.

Also, some of the questions asked by the audience members were already answered by science before – the scientists knew it, but the lay audience did not. This made answering the questions easier, as Magnus Pyke, Miriam Stoppard and David Bellamy could confidently do their experiments, knowing in advance what the result would be. Much of what occurs on Mythbusters are really novel situations – answering questions for the first time in history, with the answer far from certain.

What unites these two shows is audience participation – the questions come from the public, the show acknowledges the questions (and even names or shows the face of the person who asked it), and then tries to answer the questions by doing experiments, not by lecturing or explaining or hand-waving (though Magnus Pyke did literally wave his hands a lot). Knowing or not what the answer would be, the show hosts and the audience go for the ride together – designing and doing the experiment – the exalted common sense that looks awfully like scientific method.

What also unites these two shows is how this audience engagement translates itself into real-world engagement. Watching BBC Survival, or Cousteau, or Attenborough was a solitary event – you turn on the TV, watch it, enjoy it, learn something, and that is it. If it is Sagan late at night, you fall asleep halfway through. But if it is Don’t Ask Me, you discuss the show the next day at school or work. You debate the results of the experiments. This is exactly what happens today with Mythbusters – one thing that Jamie and Adam say they are the proudest of is that the morning after the show, kids ask their science teachers to discuss the show. Online world also discusses their show, especially if the results are difficult to interpret or bust some very dearly held myths.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Don’t Ask Me also busted myths. I remember vividly their very first episode – they answered the question “can newborns swim” by throwing babies into a pool. Aside from the fact that no IRB would allow such an experiment today, it is important to remember that back in 1970s this issue was resolved by science, but it was still a very contentious issue among the public. Miriam Stoppard knew very well that the babies she was throwing would actually swim, but half the audience did not believe it….until they saw it with their own eyes. That day, this myth was busted forever. And it made for great, exciting television!

What Mythbusters are doing right is not so much that they are driving thousands of kids into dead-end scientific careers. What they are doing – and what is really worthwhile – is that they are helping millions of their viewers internalize empiricism as the way to think about the world. Questions are not answered by preaching or lecturing or reading or studying at the Google University (although all of those are useful for getting additional information after the show), but by testing the claims by doing experiments. They are helping millions enter the Enlightenment worldview and way of thinking.

Furthermore, by not being scientists themselves, by not looking like scientists, dressing like scientists, talking like scientists, or repeatedly stating that what they are doing is science, Jamie and Adam make science approachable to everyone. If they can do science, everyone can. Just like in Victorian England, and just like Citizen Scientists today. They are not pointy-headed, elitist denizens of the Ivory Tower, but people just like you and me, people who have been given the resources to do what most of us would be able to do as well with some thinking and work. They are our representatives, members of our own community, not someone talking down to us from a position of power. And in today’s climate in the USA, this is very important.

Finally, Mythbusters teach skepticism. Many of the myths they busted were strongly believed by millions…until they saw the show that obviously demonstrated that the myth is wrong. Sure, there are always a few die-hards who will contest everything to death, but most people accept what they see on Mythbusters and learn from it. And by watching the show regularly, they get into a skeptical habit that holds over in other realms of life as well – not trusting anyone (preachers, teachers, politicians, TV talking-heads, journalists, etc.) on their word, but demanding to see the data, the results of empirical work. Mythbusters are doing as much, or more, than Sagan and others did in the 1970s, to inculcate the public into a reality-based thinking. So what if sometimes they have N=1?