Welcome to YASBC: Wired Science Blogs

Yet another science blogging community: Wired Science Blogs.

From Meet the New Wired Science All-Star Bloggers:

At Wired Science we are always looking for new ways to deliver you more science and more awesome. Starting today, we are bringing on a group of hand-picked, superstar science bloggers to help us do just that.

*snip*

We hope Wired will give these bloggers the platform and attention they deserve and help bring quality science blogging to the forefront of science discussion across the web. In recent weeks, several science blogging networks have sprung up, including PLoS blogs, LabSpaces and Science 3.0, and we plan to be an active and collaborative member of the broader science blogging community. And we've brought on expert community manager Arikia Millikan to help with that effort.

Meet Our Bloggers [edited descriptions, fuller descriptions and links at original post]

Brian Switek has been blogging about natural science for four years. His blog Laelaps, named after one of the first dinosaurs discovered in North America, started as a a small spot on the web to geek out about weird fossils and quirks of nature. Since then, he has written about science for newspapers, magazines and recently finished his first book, Written in Stone, due out Nov. 1.

Rhett Allain is a physics professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and started blogging as a way to show his students examples of potential lab projects. And then he couldn't stop. As he puts it, "When I am not blogging or teaching, I like to blog." He sees ideas for his blog Dot Physics everywhere and caught our attention with posts that describe the physics behind everyday things like basketball shots, car commercials and DIY lightning detectors.

Maryn McKenna started blogging in 2007 to field-test ideas for her second book, about the international epidemic of antibiotic resistance. Today, her blog Superbug covers news and new research about diseases in humans and animals, treatments and the lack of them, and the unintended consequences of decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time. She is especially interested in the cultural conditions that prompt infectious diseases to emerge, return or get worse.

Brian Romans is a research geologist whose latest work is focused on deep-sea geology. He began blogging four years ago, while working toward his Ph.D. at Stanford University, as a way to release pent up dissertation-writing stress and share what he thought was interesting in geoscience.

Since then, his blog Clastic Detritus has grown into a fantastic collection of posts on exciting Earth science research...

David Dobbs is an award-winning science writer who came to love blogging because of the freedom it gives him to work through ideas about neuroscience, genetics and life, and expand bits that in former times he would have left forever on the cutting room floor. His blog Neuron Culture has become invaluable to him as a way to stay connected to a larger community of writers, and to readers.

Jonah Lehrer brought his blog The Frontal Cortex to Wired Science in July. He's already won many of our readers over with his insights about the brain and human behavior including a look at the neuroscience of Inception and a post on why alcohol is good for you. Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired magazine and award-winning author of books on neuroscience, including his latest, How We Decide.

Daniel MacArthur will be joining the team in the coming weeks with his blog Genetic Future. Currently he's is in the early stages of rearing his own genetic future, and has taken a blogging hiatus to welcome his first born into the world. MacArthur is an Australian researcher whose work revolves around making use of large data-sets of human DNA sequences to learn about the genetic and evolutionary basis of human disease. When he returns, we know you'll be intrigued with his personal take on what recent studies in genomics mean for those of us interested in our own DNA.

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This will be a good addition to Wired, and hopefully will add depth and more seriousness to their science reporting.

I always wondered what Wired would do after the dot com crash, but miraculously, they have hung on. A shift towards a more serious science-reporting publication will help them I think.

Wired has always had a penchent for over-sensationalizing, reaching for the catchiest attention-grabbing headlines and that sort of thing.

From reading the cast of bloggers they hired, it gives me hope that the authors will give Wired the necessary feedback to keep the sensationalizing under control a bit.

The truth is that the science itself is so interesting that it doesn't need the over-the-top misrepresentational headlining. Switek, Lehrer, et al make quite interesting and engaging reading, and have developed a solid readership without resorting to that kind of thing. Wired would do itself a favor by picking up on the cue.

I understand deadline pressure, and the pressure to generate hits and search ratings, etc. It is an unfortunate truth that sometimes a sexed-up-headline will attract some compulsive clicks.

But there is a happy middle ground, and if the new science blog community is an indication of the level of readers they are trying to attract, they'll realize they can tone it down a bit.