A (New) Blog Announcement

What a crazy month July has been! First with PepsiGate (also here, here, and here), then once things started to quiet down a bit, we were hit with the NY Times Magazine nonsense.

But today I have some pretty exciting news. You may have heard about a new blog collective that has been formed called Scientopia. It's founding membership consists of a number of Scienceblogs refugees, but also a lot of other awesome science bloggers from around the sciblogosphere. I was invited to join this collective. And while I've clearly not planned on leaving Scienceblogs, this seemed like an exciting new project that I wanted to be a part of:

The Scientopia network is more than a collection of individuals: it's a scientific community. It serves the common goals of sharing our love of science, while respecting the diverse interests of its members. At Scientopia, the community -- of bloggers and readers, engaging with science and each other -- is not a side effect. It's the whole point.

Then I realized that there's a whole bunch of child development related stuff that I've not blogged because I don't like to stray *too* far from animal behavior and cognition, and evolution of the mind, and that sort of thing, on this blog (aside from the occasional musing on the craft of science blogging, itself).

And I've also been looking for an excuse to collaborate with incredibly talented Melody Dye. If you aren't familiar with Melody, she's written a few pieces for the Scientific American Mind Matters blog: Why Johnny Can't Name His Colors, and The Advantage of Being Helpless. I asked her if she'd be interested in collaborating on a new blog project, and she said yes.

So cruise on over to our new collaborative blog experiment, Child's Play, where we'll cover topics related to cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development in children and adolescents. We've got a lot of fun things planned, so I hope you'll check it out.

This new project won't impact my blogging here - you'll still get all the animal behavior and cognition stuff that you're used to (today's edition of Monday Pets will be coming at you this afternoon) - but I'll be posting in my typical style about peer-reviewed research in child development, as well as random musings on the subject - over at Child's Play.