Newsflash! Facebook saves science!!!

Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an over-dramatization but the reality is that 2012 was a great year for science gaining a more public face through the use of social media. 

I've already talked ad nauseum about my fandom of the @SarcasticRover Twitter feed but there are tons of other great Tweeters out there too.  The @MarsCuriosity account is a nonsarcastic view of what our new favorite robot is up to and you can follow along Curiosity's driver @Matt_Heverly as well.  Bill Nye the @ScienceGuy and @neiltyson (Neil DeGrasse Tyson), arguably the two most media visible scientists out there, are regular Tweeters.  My new personal favorite is Canadian Astronaut @Cdr_Hadfield who is currently Tweeting from the International Space Station and basically giving a blow by blow account of what it's like to live and work in space along with some phenomenal pictures.

Facebook has been another science success story with the shockingly popular I Fucking Love Science page.  This page is run by a young lady finishing up her PhD and currently has 2.3 MILLION followers.  It's a treasure trove of science tid-bits presented pretty much entirely as photos with links to articles, cartoons and science memes.  It's silly, sarcastic and fun.  Some of my other favorite Facebook science pages include Science Cosmos, NASA (duh), and Star Talk Radio.  I clearly lean towards the space side of things but all of the sciences have pages with large numbers of followers on them.  Hell, even the Higgs Boson has it's own page; just don't call it the God Particle....physicists hate that.  Science and attractive biologist merge to create Dr. Carin Bondar - Biologist With a Twist.

 Youtube has been in the mix as well with 52 million people streaming Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic sky dive from space.  There's probably some Instragram science stuff as well but since my daughter constantly points out that I use it wrong since I pretty much just use it to make it look like I can take a decent picture I'm not really sure.

So what does it all mean?   If nothing else it means that people are interested in science and possibly more importantly that science is finding a way to make itself known to them.  Not very many people are willing to sit down and read a paper in a peer reviewed journal (I don't even like doing it) but there are now ways for cool stuff to be made public in an easily understood and interesting format. 

As an example of how important it is to write science journalism in a plain understandable manner take a look at these two articles about physicists creating a gas capable of going below absolute zero.  First this one from Livescience, a normally pretty good place to get science news.  Pretty fucking hard to follow, huh?  Then from this one from the journal Nature, linked to by I Fucking Love Science.  Makes a lot mores sense now doesn't it?

Happy New Year science, go forth and do amazing things!