In September, a talented pentet of new bloggers joined Nature Network.

Daniel Frankel is in the process of setting up a lab at Newcastle University, UK. He’s a lecturer in thermodynamics and materials science, topics he’ll cover in his blog Origins of Lab. Daniel gets to say at dinner parties that his work “involves making half biological, half machine robots”.

Alyssa Gilbert is a postdoctoral fellow in planetary science at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, where she studies the relationship between comets and asteroids. Her blog is punningly entitled Way Oort West, making reference both to the cometary Oort cloud on the edges of the solar system, and to her ‘western’ location in Ontario. Her posts have already tackled the public perception of astronomers and how a post-doc might find non-academic jobs.

Anna Vilborg is a PhD student in Stockholm, Sweden, researching the regulation of mRNA stability, particularly with respect to cancer. Her blog, Scientific Intentions, discusses this research area, as well as commenting on Swedish science and science communication. In one of her earlier posts she discovers that only one in six Swedish students can name a living scientist.

Lauren Blair is a postdoc at Yale University School of Medicine. She’s also focussed on cancer molecular biology and works on epigenetics. She’s just started writing The Two Dog Blog, named after her poochy pets and a pub in Aspen.

Finally, Yi Zeng is a PhD researcher in artificial and web intelligence from Beijing University of Technology. As well as addressing these areas in his blog On Intelligent Web Yi also shares his opinions on western scientific practice from an Asian perspective.