Hello, everyone! I’m Mahala Rethlake, BioLogos’s current editorial intern. For the last few months, I’ve written an article called “Saturday Science Links” (SSL) that highlights and provides links to news articles related to science. Currently, we feature one such post on the BioLogos blog every two weeks on Saturday (hence the name). With this bi-weekly post, we hope to provide readers with a single space that contains some of the most interesting and important happenings of the scientific community. To provide the best experience possible, we have a few questions for you all.
1.) Are you a regular reader of SSL? If so, do you find it interesting/engaging? Why, or why not?
2.) In the past, we’ve featured experts on subjects related to the news articles, did you find this helpful/essential to the article? Would you like to see more of this?
3.) Do you think the number of stories we feature (around 10 per article) is a good number, or would you like to see more/less stories?
4.) Do you find the format engaging, or should we pursue other formats? What ideas do you have for what such a format might look like?
5.) Generally speaking, what suggestions do you have for improving the article so that it better serves your needs/interests?
I often share them with my grade school-age children if they are accessible. I think it would be awesome if you always tried to have one or two links that were specifically geared toward a younger audience, so parents or teachers could share those links with kids.
I really like that you have a summary for each link.
Hi Christy,
Thank you for your feedback. I’m so glad to hear that you enjoy Saturday Science Links and the summaries include with each link. The editorial team will consider your suggestion to include a link or two in each post geared toward a younger audience. So that we can catch your vision, would you reflect and share a news story or two that we have featured in the past and that worked well for sharing and discussing science with a younger audience?
For example, we like the NASA links with lots of pictures to look at and videos to watch. The video of the excavation of the woolly mammoth bones from last week and the discovery of water on mars were hits. And they still talk about the video of the tardigrades. (I had to ask my eight year old what they were called and how to spell it, because he remembers better than me.)
Sometimes I google the subject mentioned with “science news kids” and try to find it on a website geared toward school children. Teachingkidsnews.com often has simplified versions of news stories, for example. Or we look in Scholastic News, like this explanation we looked at of the running water on mars: Scholastic News
Now that I think about it, many of the links you have are great for kids. Maybe it would just be nice if they most entertaining ones or least complicated ones were flagged in some way with a “show this one to the kids” icon or something.
This is the first time. Very interesting, specially the 47 “Chinese” toots because it confirms my completely different opinion on the prehistory and human development.
@Christy,
We try to include a few links in every blog that feature photos/videos, that are particularly fascinating, and that are related to science/nature, so I’m glad you have been enjoying them and find them useful in your conversations with your son. Such interactions with science are exactly what we hope for when we publish the blog. We will continue to try to include links like the ones you mentioned. I will talk to the editorial team about whether we can do something to flag the ones that might be especially interesting for the younger crowd.