This past weekend, I sat down at my computer hell-bent on writing this post. I knew I couldn’t about write about just anything – not for my first real post on Scientific American. I mean, sure, I’ve written for the guest blog a couple times, but this is different. This is my blog. I have been obsessing about this post for weeks. Without realizing it, I was standing in front of the thickest writer’s block I’ve ever seen, a wall so dense that I spent all weekend thinking about this post and still got absolutely nowhere. Suddenly, there I was: less than 12 hours before my post was to be published, and not a single word of it written. I just needed a topic, I figured. A really, really good topic.
I named this blog “Science Sushi” for two reasons. The first was that I wanted an image that would explain how interesting and great science can be when it’s kept simple. No over-inflated results, no tenuous connections to barely-related concepts – just the research, all by itself, stripped of the scientific jargon that usually makes it inaccessible. The word “raw” kept coming to mind – that I reveal the “meat” of a study, or expose its “tender flesh.” At some point, while throwing those words around, I imagined a plate of nigiri, but overlaying the rice were atoms and animals and all the cliche images of science instead of raw slabs of fish. Suddenly my brain was filled with visions of hand rolls bursting with DNA helices and gene sequences served alongside an Erlenmeyer flask instead of a tokkuri of sake. The visual was too powerful to ignore. So, Science Sushi it was.
