Tag Archives: National Evolutionary Synthesis Center

Evolutionary blogging contest

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is sponsoring a contest for the best evolution-themed blog post. There are two prizes, travel awards to the ScienceOnline 2012 conference (Jan. 19-21, 2012) in North Carolina.

Here’s more about NESCent (from the About page),

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution. NESCent is jointly operated by Duke University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University, and is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

 

NESCent promotes the synthesis of information, concepts and knowledge to address significant, emerging, or novel questions in evolutionary science and its applications. NESCent achieves this by supporting research and education across disciplinary, institutional, geographic, and demographic boundaries.

Here’s more about the contest and the travel awards (from the Submit Your Post page),

The awards offer the opportunity to travel to North Carolina to meet with several hundred researchers, writers, editors and educators to explore how online tools are changing the way science is done and communicated to the public. Each winner will receive $750 to cover travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference. …

To apply for an award, writers should submit a blog post that highlights current or emerging evolutionary research. In order to be valid, posts must deal with research appearing in the peer-reviewed literature within the last five years. Posts should be 500-1000 words, and must mention the NESCent contest. Two recipients will be chosen by a panel of judges from both NESCent and the science blogging community.

The application deadline is Dec. 1, 2012. You may want to give this a try especially since there aren’t all that many submissions, so far (from the 2011 Entries page).

  • Byte Size Biology:  The oxygen rush:  Late January, all of February and a day in November
  • Nothing in Biology Makes Sense:  Double, double toil and trouble:  A tale of two infections
  • Butterflies and Science:  Zombie caterpillars lurch through forest canopy, infecting their brethren
  • Socera:  Cajun culture wars:  Another victory for LouSEA science education
  • The Biology Files:  If God has a plan for you, why do you pray?
  • Ideonexus:  Archeological narratives that enchant the imagination
  • BEACON Researchers at Work:  The “mating” game
  • Science Meets Religion:  Evolution right before our eyes
  • LABGIRLwrites:  What we’re up against
  • Inkfish:  Hell hath no fury like a hermaphrodite shrimp

Oddly, the deadline listed on the 2011 Entries page is Dec. 15, 2011. In any event, you can submit your blog posting by emailing your name, contact information, the title and date of your blog post, and a URL to travel.award@nescent.org.

Good luck!