Starting today, we are bringing on a group of hand-picked, superstar science bloggers to help us do just that.

The new Wired Science Blogs network will complement our news stories with more insight, opinion and geeky science details brought to you by people who are extremely knowledgeable and deeply embedded in their fields of interest, which range from infectious diseases to physics.

In recent years, independent science communicators have been building their own online enterprises, writing about the science that gets them excited, and sharing it with the world. We’ve been following them, and our all-star team of favorites are sure to impress you.

We hope Wired will give these bloggers the platform and attention they deserve and helps bring quality science blogging in general 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

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 November 1.

Switek describes his blog now as “a place to share weird and wonderful stories which are hard to find a place for among more traditional science media outlets, but deserve to be told nonetheless.” He won us over with posts on animals like bear-dogs and fossil sharks. He’s also written a story for Wired Science about the weaponry of dinosaurs.

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.

Allain has worked in experimental high-energy physics and has a PhD in physics education research. With his blogging he aims to inspire people to see the cool stuff in physics and discuss educational issues, which he sums up as, “grades are pretty much dumb and don’t help the learning process.”

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.

Currently McKenna writes for national magazines, but for most of her career she was a newspaper reporter, including 10 years as the only U.S. journalist assigned to full-time coverage of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a job that involved talking her way into last-minute deployments heading toward exotic outbreaks, provided the material for her first book and earned her the nickname “Scary Disease Girl.”

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 PhD 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, both new and classic, as well as photos and stories from his many geology field trips around the world. His series showing incredible images from new seafloor mapping technology is a favorite among his loyal readers, and we know you’ll love it too. (Brian does all this in his free time and keeps his blogging separate from his day job.)

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.

Dobbs has written three books and is at work on his fourth. He also writes for national magazines and websites. But, he says “the sort of conversation that blogging creates is an inestimable gift to a gregarious writer.”

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 for 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.

We know you’re going to enjoy our new bloggers, and we hope you’ll join in what promises to be a very interesting discussion about all aspects of science.

Image: Map of the internet./OPTE project.

Authors: Betsy Mason

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