The 27 Must-Follow Feeds in the World of Science

Here's everyone you need to know to keep up with the science world.
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Diego Patiño

Emily Lakdawalla | Twitter

You don’t love space science enough. Lakdawalla works for the Planetary Society, and her Twitter feed (What’s Cassini up to? Oh hai Saturn!) will boost your affection. (Illustrated above).

CityLab | Website

Cities aren’t—or at least shouldn’t be—accidental. The intrepid writers for CityLab find the data that explains how cities work and how they’re changing.

Alex Wellerstein | Twitter

It’s nuclear weapons all the way down, as tweeted by a nuclear historian.

Bruce Bottomley

Myles Lab | Twitter

Sean Myles’ plant biology lab at Dalhousie University in Canada uses genetics to understand the history and evolution of what people eat. He’s an ace with apples and trained on wine grapes, and his team’s insights on the genetics of our food are invaluable.

Retraction Watch | Blog

When a journal pulls a paper for being wrong or fake or plagiarized, Ivan Oransky’s crew is there to make sure science does better next time.

Mike Bostock | Github

Let Bostock—until recently a graphics editor at The New York Times—show you how he uses the web’s native languages to turn raw numbers into shapes, colors, graphs, charts, and maps.

Last Word on Nothing | Blog

This crowd of amazing science journalists got together to write stories and they ended up generating a beautiful website. From “How to Write a Science Feature” to imploring the National Institutes of Health to fund research on orphan diseases, they publish essay after essay, all lovely, about the culture of science itself.

Courtesy of Leonid Kruglyak

Leonid Kruglyak | Twitter

He’s a straight-up biologist and yeast expert, but Kruglyak1 is also one of the most social-media-engaged researchers out there. Come for the thoughtful analysis of new research; stay for the humor. (Party trick: Add “because epigenetics” to the end of your fortune cookie reading.)

StarTalk | Radio

The title is a misnomer. Neil deGrasse Tyson covers GMOs, the science of sex, and tons of other topics with guests you definitely want to hear from.

The Story Collider | Podcast

Riveting tales about how we actually produce knowledge and how we understand our understanding of the world around us. Meta, man. Really meta.

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The universe is 14 billion years old yet still very, very photogenic. From the birthing crèches of stars to the icy wilderness of Pluto to the populated coastlines of Earth artificially lit against the night, NASA brings home the best images captured by its robots and people.

60-Second Science | Podcast

These one-minute windows into the latest discoveries range from dark matter to the downside of high-intensity exercise (it can poison your blood).

Raychelle Burks | Blog

On her blog Thirty-Seven, Burks dispenses equal helpings of crime, hardcore chemistry, and pop culture. She also knows what plants might provide the Purple Wedding poison in Game of Thrones.

Chris Hadfield | Twitter

He’s back on Earth now, but the former space shuttle commander still has plenty of fascinating space facts to tweet.

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Eric Topol | Twitter

Wireless technology, big data, cheap sensors—medicine is changing fast, and this Scripps cardiologist is on it. His Twitter feed is jam-packed with papers you need to read, visualizations you can gawk at, and the latest smart medical reporting.

Symmetry | Magazine

You know the Large Hadron Collider is a big deal, but you’re not quite sure why. Symmetry will get you fluent in the language of particle physics in no time.

Charlie Loyd | Twitter

Spacey riffs on everything from shuttle tiles to satellites to NASA’s budget.

Deep Sea News | Twitter

The ocean is vast and often unknowable. Luckily, the scientists at Deep Sea News can guide us.

Bianca Alexis

WTF, Evolution?! | Tumblr

Mara Grunbaum’s existential dialogues with the metaphysical embodiment of evolution, toiling away on the most F’d up critters on Darwin’s green Earth, do more than introduce funny animals. They point out that life abides by a system that we can figure out. Science is weird, but it’s also true.

PLOS | Blog

The Public Library of Science would like to explain things to you. Important things, like the science behind Dad Bod or the current research on salamanders in southwestern New Hampshire. OK, and really important things like potential problems with meta-analysis.

Elizabeth Kolbert | Twitter

The world is full of so many doomsday-heralding stories of climate change that they don’t even freak us out anymore. But Elizabeth Kolbert’s writing in The New Yorker—and the frank infographics she often tweets—still make us go gulp. Did you not know that the world is undergoing a coal renaissance? Now you do.

Biodiversity Heritage Library | Flickr

This compendium of more than 100,000 old (like, way-back-to-the-15th-century old) science books is a delight. If you don’t feel like deploying your French to read a 1764 history of insects written for young people, then just browse the photos on Flickr for a visual feast of olde-tyme drawings of bugs, birds, bees, and beasts.

ff-cultlit-1-scifeeds-11Science & Nature | Magazines

The two best scientific journals in the world have front-of-book sections that kick ass at the latest news and the controversies behind recent discoveries.

The Disease Experts

Helen Branswell | Twitter

Laurie Garrett | Twitter

Maryn McKenna | Blog

Tara Smith | Twitter

The tale of how new diseases emerge and old ones come back could very well be the last science story anyone ever reads—and these four writers cover its finest details and scariest moments. They don’t work together—McKenna blogs at National Geographic, and Smith is a professional epidemiologist. Branswell works at the Canadian Press, and Garrett (below) is at the Council on Foreign Relations. But each deftly lays out the latest research and discoveries.

1 UPDATE 8/19/15 12:16 PM This story originally misspelled Leonid Kruglyak's name.