Twitter bird and science, a perfect match (Twitter)

I ask this question without a trace of irony. In a world heady with Facebook and infused with Instagram, where Snapchat is on the prowl and Vine grows wild, what can a message of persistently finite length and limited multimedia capability possibly do? For science and scientists? For journalists? For you and me?

The answer turns out to be: quite a bit.

.@Katie_PhD made an AMAZING info graphic about our twitter MS. This just blows my mind! Thank you pic.twitter.com/M2bxbWoiAV

— Joshua Drew (@Drew_Lab) May 9, 2013

In every corner of the world, scientists are doing that they should have been doing since the dawn of time: getting their messages down to meaningful quanta - distilling their work into bite-sized bits of brain-digestible tastiness. They are including helpful, user-friendly graphics. They are attaching astounding pictures and short videos that hook viewers, reeling in the general public for a closer look at all this crazy, beautiful, messy science stuff. In other words, scientists are tweeting.

And the audience is listening. Today, as 1-in-40 academics flit around the twittersphere, 55% of their followers are other scientists, but the not-to-silent slight-minority are, well, us: the media and the general public. Research about science-followers of all types shows that when scientists tweet their peer-reviewed research, it is RTed 19% of the time. No interpretation, no sullying, no muddling or meddling even by the most diligent of scientific of reporters (clears throat, looks around). It’s the opposite of Garbage In, Garbage Out (GI-GO). Good science goes into the twitterspace, and, increasingly, good science comes out (GSI-GSO). 

So it goes: Science casts its shimmering net into the feeds and the haul is bountiful. One recent conference of conservation biologists reached 110,000 people via 1731 tweets. It doesn’t take a genius, or even a calculator, to know that something really neat is afoot. So, what now? 

Now, we comment, of course. It’s twitter! It’s journalism! And, last but not least, it is science. With one appendage firmly lodged in each of these domains, I, your humble guide, propose to gather the best tweets that science has to offer. We will round them up and feast upon the sciency goodness. We will talk about what makes them good tweets, good science, and good science tweets - if they are good science tweets. Which, indeed, some of them are…

...Let’s sail toward that horizon where good science becomes accessible to all. It’s always been there, but now, suddenly, it’s not as distant as before. Doesn’t a horizon, by definition, recede when you approach it? I say we find out…

...Let’s Fly.

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Reach Contributor Sheyna E. Gifford here.