An Oxford graduate student by day and a scientific activist by night, Nick Anthis isn't letting his Ph.D. research in protein structure get in the way of defending scientific and social progress.
Yes, it's true. I've been called a "budding Matt Drudge." In a post on the recent Nature science blog rankings, The Tech Chronicles wrote:
And Nick Anthis is a budding Matt Drudge. His revelations about a NASA official who was accused of squelching interviews about global warming contributed to the official's resignation.
I'm not really sure what to make of that, especially since The Scientific Activist, as a site dedicated to exploring the complexities of the issues, is basically the complete opposite of the Drudge Report. I guess I wouldn't mind it so much if I was getting a cut of the millions of dollars Drudge brings in every year....
The point of the post was that the top-ranked science blogs had gotten to where they are by throwing off the scientific shackles of restraint and objectivity and delving straight into the controversies of the day. There's some truth to that. Sure, I don't write too much about pure science, and although PZ Myers of Pharyngula covers his fair share of science, it's overshadowed by his rants on religion and politics. On the other hand, the other three blogs in the Nature top five--The Panda's Thumb, RealClimate, and Cosmic Variance--primarily stick to science or at least the politics directly related to a specific scientific field. Either way, there's quite a bit of diversity there, and there's no single formula for success.
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