science.metafilter.com?

July 30, 2009 12:35 AM

Where do you go to discuss science online?

I would like to find the best scientific discussions, websites, blogs, news, etc... online.

As a grad student, I would like to start becoming more involved in the scientific community outside of my school and immersing myself in new research taking place, scientific reviews, and take part in the discussion to better understand my field.

What better resource than the internet, right?

Bonus points if they emphasize biotechnology, genomics, or molecular biology.

posted by clearly to science & nature (11 comments total)

Not to discuss, but 3quarksdaily is a wonderful blog, a significant portion of which is devoted to new science.
posted by wfrgms at 12:43 AM on July 30

My favorite magazine in the whole world is New Scientist and they have a pretty active blog, although I really like curling up with the magazine better. A lot of the content is available on their website.
Here is Nature's list of the 50 best science blogs.
And then the old standby - Carl Zimmer's The Loom.
But, honestly, as someone who needed to keep up to date on science news for a living I never found anything that beat New Scientist for distilling and presenting the latest, most interesting research. It's a lot of short articles, so then I'd follow up online to find actual papers and longer discussions. For me, this *gasp* paper product was more practical and useful than any one resource I found online for finding out about the hot topics of the day. And then I'd google them and find where people were talking about them.
posted by munichmaiden at 1:32 AM on July 30

If you want something very field-specific and with deep discussion and asking round your department doesn't find you something - why not start a place?
CiteULike now has great facilities for enabling discussion of papers especially within a particular group - your group could have its own communal forum and blog there to discuss new research.
And it doesn't take much to just throw up a PHP forum of some sort to have the wider community discuss things - it's pretty much what happened in cosmology to give us cosmocoffee.
If you build it, they will come.
posted by edd at 2:06 AM on July 30

I used to read one of these three forums regularly. It's been years and I don't remember which it was, but I know the discussion levels ranged from pretty obvious "homework" questions to decent threads about the latest hot thing with lots of links to sources.
posted by Science! at 2:09 AM on July 30

Buy a subscription to Nature or Science and have it delivered to your house. For students they are pretty cheap, perhaps $1.50 an issue. Most of the technical papers have a one-page summary (by, I suspect, a reviewer) for people outside the field. Pretty bio-heavy, too.

I know you asked about online fora. But I felt much more plugged in to the broader community after some time receiving those primary journals, and less so after switching to trying to skim online.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 3:48 AM on July 30

I'm addicted to The Frontal Cortex. It is a blog, not a discussion site, but always fresh and intriguing.
posted by francesca too at 5:36 AM on July 30

Might check out The Life Scientists or Science 2.0 on FriendFeed, or look for others there.
posted by unknowncommand at 6:47 AM on July 30

I recently discovered Yale Environment 360. It's primarily about climate science and published by Yale Dept. of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
posted by archimago at 7:02 AM on July 30

I agree with fantabulous timewaster: my subscription to Science was perhaps the best purchase I ever made. As well as lots of research papers on cool new science, it has extremely good Perspective, Review, and News Focus pieces. Your university library will certainly subscribe, but it's nice to have a paper copy of one's own.

The webcomic XKCD has a Science board on its forum which you might find interesting. There's more discussion of physical than biological sciences, and though there are a few grad students and PhDs there, many of the questions posed are at a rather lower level.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 7:11 AM on July 30

Respectful Insolence
Pharyngula
(and about 70 others on scienceblogs.com)
Science-Based Medicine
NeuroLogica Blog

Essentially just find a blog you like and then read their blogroll and/or note the other blogs that they frequently reference. That will quickly give you a large list of sites to follow.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:04 AM on July 30

Thanks for all the great answers everyone! I'm really looking forward to checking out all of theses suggestions.

edd, I'll seriously consider it.
posted by clearly at 2:43 PM on July 30