Open Lab 2008 now in print!

Last November we entered a post from TPG into a friendly competition for science writing on the web. Our entry was selected for this fine anthology and I am happy to announce it is now in print and available here at Lulu.com. (It will be available from Amazon later, but buying it from Lulu means that the proceeds go to organizing ScienceOnline '10 next January.)

At first I was skeptical of the validity of this competition thinking it might be like those "poetry anthologies" anyone taking a high school English class is solicited to submit to, but I now realize that openlab is a legitimate competition displaying the best science writing out there. Entries from some of my favorite blogs like Panda's Thumb, and not exactly rocket science have been selected in the past. There was even a shout out to the openlab competition in Discover Magazine on page 20 of the March 2009 issue. Along with us, two professional science writers for Discover were honored among the top 50 science posts for 2008 in openlab.

Participation in this process has been truly rewarding, introducing TPG to a broad range of creative minds and new ideas. Read our entry here. I encourage anyone reading this to consider participating in our own competition the theme of which is not relegated to scientific musings but is a challenge to integrate multiple forms of media into a flowing and coherent thought. On top of some cash you may even earn some new dendritic morphology.