Happy Holidays to Our Readers, and a Little Recap

As 2024 comes to a close, we are happy to reflect on another successful year in which we had the opportunity to bring you a diverse array of exciting and insightful articles, continuing our mission of interdisciplinary science communication and dialogue. First and foremost, we would like to thank our authors: it is their passion for science and their commitment to crafting outstanding articles – mostly in their free time – that make this blog possible. We also thank you, our readers, for your growing interest in our blog. Your numerous engagements are the greatest reward for our efforts. This year marked a milestone: for the first time since our launch in late 2022, our relatively young blog surpassed the mark of 100 unique daily visitors, and the growth has been accelerating over time.

Looking back to the beginning two years ago, this success did not materialize overnight. For us as a team, editorial work on the STRUCTURES Blog has been a valuable learning experience. At the outset, we had many questions. For instance: what does interdisciplinary science communication mean? Who is our target audience? How do we overcome barriers due to differences in language and concepts across disciplines? Perhaps the trickiest part has been the issue of conveying even complex subjects from our excellence cluster in a way that is both simple, accessible, and fun to read for a broad audience. Over time, we found that three things are key: good visuals, an interdisciplinary editorial team uniting different perspectives, and a clear system of editorial guidelines combined with advice and supervision.

One achievement we are very proud of is how our blog has supported STRUCTURES’ aim of connecting people from different scientific disciplines and of increasing visibility of early-career researchers. Our authors’ diverse fields and backgrounds enrich the blog, and give rise to meaningful exchanges and mutual learning within our cluster’s community. In turn, our blog has greatly benefited from the organic development of the STRUCTURES cluster over the past five years. When STRUCTURES began, it initiated and strengthened collaborations between mathematicians, experimental and theoretical physicists, astronomers, and computer scientists (several of whom had previously had little interaction) – now the cluster has grown into a whole thriving “interdisciplinary community” united by a unique common spirit. This spirit is a driving force in the daily work of many of us, including the blog team. Without it, it would likely have been a lot more difficult to curate a blog in which astronomy, physics, mathematics, and scientific computing meet in one place.

We are excited to return in January with fresh subjects and ideas. Stay tuned for many new exciting blog posts on the questions that bring us together as a community: understanding collective phenomena, the formation of structure, and the detection of structure in areas ranging from mathematics to neuroscience and from quantum physics to cosmology. Additionally, we look forward to establishing posts co-authored by duos or trios of researchers from very different cluster areas as a new regular format. These posts will present different perspectives on a topic in a dialogue that crosses disciplines – creating further opportunities for mutual learning and exchange.

The STRUCTURES Blog team wishes all readers a joyous holiday season and a happy, fulfilling new year!