Curation of @realscientists starts tonight!

Colour me terrified.

@realscientists is the brainchild of a few people, namely @scienceupulie and @DrYobbo both scientists in their own right and also science communicators.

Which means they blog and tweet and podcast about science all the time. 

@realscientists is a rotation curation Twitter account which means one scientist takes over each week and tweets about his/her work, whatever field of science it may be. The curators are introduced and farewelled each weekend on the Real Scientists blog and their tweets are usually storifyed for posterity as well.

Last week it was sharks with @WhySharksMatter taking over for the week. From next Sunday it will be a virologist who likes to find out how viruses infect the brain. Or something like that.

But this Sunday, tonight, in a few hours, I take over the account for a week.

I, the first science journalist/writer to curate it. Egad.

I wonder if people are actually going to interact and ask questions – there are 5000+ followers for the account, surely some of them must be interested in science journalism and how it works?

But can I explain it adequately in 140 characters?

Perhaps I cannot but I should try.

And I can’t show them any lovely photographs because I am useless at that sort of thing. Unless they want to see peacocks or monkeys. I am good at peacocks and monkeys. Magdeline Lum is the awesome science photographer, not me.

And I am too busy running around to usually blog adequately about science journalism save for ranting on the issue of false balance.

But luckily for me, it is Mental Health Week in Australia. So I can talk about that, about my thesis on neuroscience, about science journalism, about reviewing science books, about how to edit science work, about how to use scientific research in crime fiction.

And there will be G+ Hangouts and other awesome things galore.

Things will get interesting in the next few hours. If you want to join in, you can follow along by following @realscientists .