A couple of house-keeping things. Firstly, if you cast your eyes a few pixels upwards, you'll notice the snazzy new banner. All the Discover blogs now have them to give us a bit more of an individual feel. I love mine/them. The designer's done a great job with reconciling the "rocket science" bit with the fact that I write almost entirely about biology. You can see the rest of the logos on the sidebar, and I'll probably be doing a Cafepress store at some point. Secondly, you might have noticed that there's also a "Support Science Writers" box in the sidebar. I've added this in light of my new initiative to voluntarily pay for the best science writing that I read. In the comments, people suggested various ways that these micropayments could be done easily, but all the best suggestions involve adding some sort of code to one's site. While a simple solution may take some more work, I've implemented these Paypal buttons as a temporary fix. The top one goes to the writers I pick every month, distributed equally (any donations this month will go to February's picks, and so on). The bottom one goes to me and I'll match a third of the donations and send that to the chosen writers too. Both go to my Paypal account but they're tagged differently so I can sort through all the donations and distribute them easily. This isn't ideal by any means, but like many things on the Internet, I thought I'd give it a go and see what happens. So if any of you would like to support NERS or any of the other great blogs that I link to, please feel free to contribute. There is, of course, no expectation to do this. For reference, here are the people who I've donated to this month:
Human (amphibious model): living in and on the water, by Greg Downey
Circadian clock without DNA–History and the power of metaphor, by Bora Zivkovic
Hidden Light: The Visual Language of an Autistic Photographer, by Steve Silberman
Iron-deficiency is not something you get just for being a lady, by Kate Clancy
Ancestor Worship, by Brian Switek
Running out of antibiotics — and other drugs too, by Maryn McKenna
How IBM’s Watson Computer Excels at Jeopardy!, by John Rennie
Saving Ethiopia’s Church Forests, by Delene Beeland
The Mere Existence of Whales, by Carl Zimmer
Science education for all, by Alice Bell
