Jon Evans - Science Writer

New Year, new blog

Well somehow two weeks has become two months. So my new year’s resolution is to write this blog a lot more regularly. But seeing as I’ve promised that before and it hasn’t happened yet, we’ll have to see whether this resolution falls into the cliché of being quickly forgotten.

23 hours ago

Trendy vicars

I know it’s been a bit of a long time since my last blog entry (I’ve been on holiday again, although I won’t bore you with the details this time), but I’m going to sort of continue where I left off with the last entry. Is getting publicity for science always a good thing and does it actually encourage people to become more interested in science?

63 days ago

Hold the front page

It’s outside my area of expertise and took place almost a month ago. But it’s still the biggest thing to happen in the world of science for quite a while and so I’m going to write about the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

92 days ago

Hooray for The Long Tail

The internet may have had a transformational effect on most areas of our lives: from the way we work to the way we socialise to the way we access information. Indeed, being a freelance science writer would be a whole lot more difficult without the internet. But aside from that, one of the greatest boons of the internet for me is the way it’s allowed me to get hold of obscure music.

120 days ago

What I did on my holidays

I’ve just returned from a two-week holiday in France feeling relaxed and refreshed, but also troubled by the knowledge that I haven’t written anything for this blog in ages. So now dear reader, to address this oversight, you’re going to have the dubious honour of hearing all about my holiday. Happily, however, I can fit in a bit of related science as well.

141 days ago

From hard to soft science

I spend the vast majority of my time writing about chemistry and I love it. The great thing about chemistry is that it’s so wide-ranging and underpins so many scientific disciplines that you can write about practically anything – nanotechnology, energy, astronomy, disease, genetically-modified crops – and I have. It’s almost always possible to find a chemistry angle to any scientific or technological story.

168 days ago

After the flood

I think I’m going to have to stop claiming that this blog is weekly, because it’s clearly not. I’m still going to aim for weekly updates, but the precise timing looks like it's going to be fairly variable, with things continually cropping up and interfering with my plans. Last week, I was flat out trying to finish editing a report for the Environment Agency and just didn’t have time to write the blog. But fortunately (for both me and the blog) the report was on a fairly interesting topic.

176 days ago

The horror, the horror

Okay, once again I’m late with this week’s blog. But on the plus side, I actually have a proper subject this week, and that’s how nature just keeps on coming up with the best and most bizarre types of parasitism, trumping anything that human writers can think up.

189 days ago

Apologies and science books

First off, I’ve got to make two connected apologies. The first one is for this week’s blog being a bit late. My excuse is that I’ve been ill with a chest infection. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but suffice to say that there’s been lots of coughing and hacking.

200 days ago

Commenting on comments

When writing for a print magazine, it sometimes seems like you’re throwing your article out into the void, because you hardly ever get any feedback from readers. You might get a ‘thank you’ from the researcher whose work you’ve written about, but that’s usually about it. And the few times that you do receive any feedback, it’s usually some kind of criticism or to point out an error.

210 days ago