---

This is the first of what I hope will be a new series on this blog, providing an overview of key topics that I find myself drawn to again and again.

The idea for this has been germinating for a while now, not least because it seemed a shame that old posts get forgotten in the mists of time. Much has been written about the importance of context in modern science journalism – providing the necessary background so that readers can put new discoveries in their broader context. To achieve this, I considered doing topic pages like those that many newspaper sites do, but I (and others) find the automated nature of these pages to be ultimately unfulfilling. You need some sort of human editorial control to make them useful.

At a recent blogging talkfest, someone in the audience asked about whether blog posts could be aggregated into an educational resource, like a textbook. The idea seemed promising but the disparity of style across different blogs, and the rubbish quality of most blog search engines, makes this a difficult venture. But these primers, hopefully, address these shortcomings – the idea is that I will take old material and re-edit them into a coherent tour through an exciting topic. The tour will take the form of an online slide show, as powered by Discover’s cool slide technology.

Let me know your thoughts.

(PS – Credit to Ferris Jabr for suggesting the name “The Yong and Short of It. In the end I went for something simple, but I might use that in the future