I can’t believe it’s already been a whole year! After many friends and colleagues encouraged me, I started this blog at the beginning of December in 2013. I didn’t know what to expect, but I think it’s been worthwhile, and I look forward to continuing with it.

For those of you who are interested, especially you regular readers of this blog, I’ll use this post to review and assess the blog so far. Most of all, I’d like to thank all of you readers and those of you who have shared my posts, gave me advice and feedback, helped me to improve posts, and had interesting discussions with me about the issues and events in them.

I wrote about one post per week, and I hope I’m continually getting better. My most popular blog posts included those about: gender and racial diversity issues in science; Rosetta and the comet; the solar flare that could have been much worse; fracking; climate change resilience; the academic job market; citizen science and Galaxy Zoo; an event about the multiverse; and debates and budgets for scientific research and STEM education. (See my list of blog posts.)

Considering that many of my posts, especially the science policy ones, are US-based, it’s not surprising that the majority of visitors to this site are from the US. Many people from the UK, Canada, Germany, Brazil, and other places visit it as well. People reach the site from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, my work website, and from other websites where I’ve published or posted articles.

For the next year, I’m not sure how regularly I’ll keep writing on the blog, but I’ll do my best. I’ll definitely keep writing about both science policy and astronomy/astrophysics news and events. Some will be more like science news stories and some will review the various issues and players involved. In the next couple months, I’ll write about the annual American Astronomical Society meeting in January and about the Citizen Science Association and American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in February, all of which I’ll be attending (but traveling by train!). I’ll try writing a book review or two too, as I’m looking forward to reading books about Fukushima and environmental justice. I might review Interstellar as well, but I haven’t seen it yet, so don’t give me spoilers!

Please keep giving me your comments, questions, criticism, corrections, and feedback (either on the blog itself, on Twitter or Facebook, subspace communication, or in person). And please keep sharing the posts that you like or that interest you, and whenever you have more information or news relevant to something I’ve written, please let me know. Also, contact me if you have any interest in writing a guest post here some time.

Finally, as you may know or have guessed, I’m continuing to pursue work in scientific research and education as well as science writing/communication and science policy. As I learn more and improve in these fields, I may occasionally write about my challenges, tribulations, and successes as well.