New Sciblings, Book Club, and More

Lots of new things to tell you about.

First, SB has reinvigorated the ScienceBlogs Book Club. The first book being discussed is "Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service" by Mark Pendergrast, who is participating in the book club himself, and already has a post up.

Second, exciting news from SB headquarters:

We here at ScienceBlogs are pleased to announce that beginning today, we will be helping to spark the next generation of research communications by introducing new blogs to our network from the world's top scientific institutions. The initial list includes: CERN, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), SETI Institute, Weizmann Institute of Science, and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The Weizmann Institute of Science and Brookhaven National Laboratory blogs are live now.

Blogs for the rest of the original five will be going live this week, so check back!

In the words of our Editor Evan Lerner, "Today we are expanding the ScienceBlogs platform to include the world's top labs, enriching the discussion for our readers and providing these institutions with a new way of communicating their incredible research online. We see this as the next big leap in our mission of hosting and spurring the world's conversation about science."

Finally, The Third Reviewer is a place where readers can comment directly on different original research articles, just like you can on a blog. Right now it's only for neuroscience, but maybe if it gets popular it will expand. Drugmonkey and Sci have explained why this is a good thing and how it works.