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Jon Evans Blog
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.
2 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.
10 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.
23 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.
34 days ago
Comments: the agony and the ecstasy
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.
44 days ago
Life on Mars and elsewhere
Well, it appears that interesting science stories are like buses, you wait ages for one and then two come along together. Although in this case the two stories are related. For it appears that extraterrestrial life may be further away than we hoped, but closer than we feared. That’s if two recent scientific studies are to be believed.
51 days ago
Still no science
Well I said last week that it wasn’t a good sign and I was right. Once again, I haven’t managed to think of a single interesting science topic to write about. Although it’s not the interesting science topic that’s the problem; it’s the writing about it.
59 days ago
Ignoring sequels
I must admit it’s not a good sign. Two weeks into my new blog and I can’t think of anything to write about. Well, I can’t think of anything sciency to write about anyway. The problem is that I’m still not used to looking for fun science news to cover in the blog, rather than the more serious stuff that I usually write about, or to find the science angle to other topics. So this blog piece is going to have no science angle to it whatsoever, although there will be a bit of science fiction. Instead, it’s going to be about ignoring film sequels.
66 days ago
Keep Heroes away from science
Like all intellectual science writer-types, I don’t watch much TV. Apart from Dr Who and The Simpsons (which I of course only watch because I have young children), numerous films (because I fancy myself as something of a film buff), loads of film and music documentaries (especially those that count down the top 100 something or other, to which I am frankly addicted) and international rugby matches. But nothing apart from that. Except Heroes.
73 days ago
Welcome to my blog
I’m not really one for blogs, never having had the time or inclination to read one on a regular basis. So it’s fairly hypocritical of me to decide to write one. But I’ve got this fancy new web site and so I thought I might as well have a blog.
83 days ago
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