This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Last month, I was lucky enough to be asked by fellow Sci Am blogger Carin Bondar to compose and record a short spot about my first February nematode post (Nematode Roundworms Own This Place) for our new Sci Am feature Best of the Blogs. It challenging and somewhat scary work to condense it all down to a few hundred words, memorize it, and then recount it all without flubbing in front of a rolling camera. I had to do a few dozen takes before I got the take you'll see. Here's our blog editor Bora Zivkovic's description of this new feature (only in its second month), and below is the video itself.
This was fun and I hope to do it again sometime!
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As well, I entered the ScienceSeeker Award contest, a new prize that I think will be taking the place of the seemingly defunct Research Blogging awards. Here's Bora's description of the new contest. I nominated my post "Archaea are More Wonderful Than You Know" -- a tribute to the late Carl Woese and the fascinating world of archaea he discovered. You can nominate any post of any blogger you like, including one of your own -- instructions are at Bora's post or at the award contest link at the top of this paragraph.
If you liked my archaea post, though, would you help me make it to the finals by going to the post's Science Seeker page and "recommending" it? All you have to do is go here and click the little gold star in the upper right corner of the page. The finalists will be determined by the number of people recommending each post.
Finally, to send you off to a happy weekend, here's a clip I wasn't able to put in my original archaea post. It's an excerpt of a Discovery channel interview with Carl Woese, who speaks in his own words about the thunderclap discovery of archaea. Considering the lukewarm -- if not cold -- reception his discovery received at the time, I found it quietly touching, and I hope you will too. Enjoy.