#democratize science

Our first topic for you, as requested by our readers, is the biology of brains!

Tell us everything you know about brains– how they’re structured, and how they work. A few questions to get you thinking:

• What’s the history of the biology of brains?
• How are brains organized?
  
• How do brains function?
• How do brains differ across species?
• Where do you think science is headed with regard to the biology of brains?

Note that all of these questions can be answered at many different levels and in thousands of different ways, not to mention that we encourage thinking outside of these guiding questions! We’re just asking you to give us a tiny bit of anything you know.

Again, the rules, for those new to our game:

• Reblog and add anythingthat comes to mind regarding the topic– facts you know, things you learned in school, questions you have, links to an article, papers you’ve read– we mean anything!
• If you don’t think you have anything to contribute, just reblog and pass the thread along to your followers.

That’s it! SciNote will be reading every single one of your responses, and given enough responses, we will combine your contributions, citing your work, in one big comprehensive article to be posted on SciNote.org.

Dear Readers,

Happy 2016! It’s a new year, and SciNote’s excited to try something completely new.

In light of the enormous, amazing, and ever growing Tumblr Science Community, we’ve got an idea: we’re going to take our philosophy that anyone, and everyone, is a scientist to the next level. Let’s put all of our love for science together and tap the collective resource that our millions of brilliant, passionate minds create.

So here’s the idea (and the rules of the game):

Every week, we’re going to post a topic or a question for all of you to discuss. The topics will be pretty general, perhaps something like plants and evolution or biomimetics, and the post might come with a few guiding questions or ideas to get you started.

Then, it’s your turn. Your job is to reblog and add anythingthat comes to mind regarding the topic– facts you know, things you learned in school, questions you have, links to an article, papers you’ve read– we mean anything! It can be as long or as short as you like: you can write paragraphs if you like, but a couple of sentences would also be great. If you don’t think you have anything to contribute, just reblog and pass the thread along to your followers.

You don’t have to be an expert in the subject– that’s the whole point of this! Our goal is just to get ideas and trains of scientific thought bouncing off one another and see where we wind up in the end. It’s like one big Tumblr brainstorm.

SciNote will be reading every single one of your responses, and given enough responses, we will combine all of your contributions, citing all of your work, in one big comprehensive article to be posted on SciNote.org.

This is as much an experiment for us as it is for you. We’re curious to see how this goes, and what you come up with. What do you say, Tumblr? Are you in?