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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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If you haven't heard - and you will, because I will keep talking about it - citizen science is getting its own summit this weekend, when H+ sponsors "Rise of the Citizen-Scientist"(1) ... but that is not all that's been going on.   Citizen Science is (finally) catching on everywhere.   It's the new Prius!
A columnist at the Guardian wants help from the Web to determine the best science sites on the Web he and others there don't currently know about.   He put his personal favorites in the article and, not surprisingly, it was heavy on the political/cultural writers in science blogging but I suppose that is why they are asking for help; the shrillest and most aggressive self-promoters (and some are owned by corporate media companies) will be known but not necessarily the best.  

If you want to perhaps see your name in The Guardian you can get someone to nominate you, or do it yourself.
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Jun 02 2010 | comment(s)

Before he was House on the TV series named ... "House" ... Hugh Laurie was a comedian; you know, one of those smug types UK people love, except he was actually funny.    In this clip, he and fellow comedian Stephen Fry (fun fact - they were introduced by Emma Thompson of Howard's End", "Sense and Sensibility" and one of my wife's favorite Christmas movies, "Love Actually", while at Cambridge in 1980) take a poke at mathematicians, but it could easily apply to any scientist:
3 Quarks Daily is a 'filter blog' that compiles stuff from around the web on a daily basis, in science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else they deem inherently fascinating.

They say the name derives from that moment in 1964 when Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig postulated the existence of three new subatomic particles and Gell-Mann decided to name them "quarks", an unusual word meaning "croak" or "caw" which James Joyce had used in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" 
Joanne Chu, community moderator at Ranker.com, did such a terrific list of cutest animals impacted by the BP oil spill that rather than put up a link, which might only get a relatively small number of readers, I asked if we could print it here and get it out to perhaps a lot.  That is, if this Internet thing is working properly.   
"The Year Of (insert your favorite cause here)" is usually driven by marketing departments and often to correspond to some sort of milestone.   2009 was "The Year of..." both Galileo and Darwin, for example, though no one seemed to find a way to bring either to mainstream popularity and make a buck.  

What about 2010?    Sure, the UN declared 2010 the 'International Year of Biodiversity' but, like most things the UN is involved in, it cost a lot of money and doesn't actually do anything.    Outside science, 2010 is the Year of the Nurse.   Everyone likes nurses.