Gisting Off Into the Sunset

It's been a year since I started writing for the Gist, and over our lifetime we've amassed more than 200 posts. But the time has come to ride into the sunset - to kick off into that happy blogosphere in the sky, where the rivers babble with happy comments and the posts fly off the keyboards like tiny birds.

We're retiring the Gist, and this is our goodbye post.

Over the last year, you've gallantly followed along as I posted about treebound evolution, extremely prompt pesticide resistance, first-hand penguin sightings in Antarctica, the crazy sanity of gas prices, the unimaginably huge turtle trade in China, giant prairie-stomping pterosaurs, a galactic collision that looks like Tinkerbell, very dead Norwegian (OK, Danish) parrots, NASA fashions, most possible angles on Tyrannosaurus rex and giant pandas, the oddly familiar numbing heat of Chinese soup - and, as they say, much, much more.

And I wasn't alone. Virginia Hughes (who still blogs here) kept us updated on solar power, the Grand Canyon, and the suggestion that our time in history should be named after all the trouble we've caused. Sarah Zielinski tracked down a murder mystery involving gorillas and warned us about Burmese pythons invading the U.S. Laura Helmuth added news about dams and expensive gems.

But this is America, where everyone's a sucker for a happy ending, even the Smithsonian. So the Gist isn't totally vanishing: in its place you'll find a sampler platter of new blogs: Dinosaur Tracking - hot and cold running dinosaurs; a new science blog called Surprising Science and written by Sarah; and my new project, with Laura Helmuth and Amanda Bensen: Food and Think, where we'll be writing about the culture and science of food.

Food and Think had its beginnings this summer: a curious explanation for chile heat, and globalization's role in reviving an ancient Oaxacan drink. We realized that food and cooking are marvelous, complex fields of study that also make our mouths water. Cuisine is the accumulated results of millions of amateur chemists in millions of kitchen laboratories. It's chemistry distilled by history, and it's completely fascinating. We hope to serve you some of the choicest tidbits - and to whet your imagination as well as your appetite. I can barely wait.

So thanks to everyone for reading, for commenting, for adding us to your RSS feed. I hope you'll follow me over to Food and Think, or keep your eye on our other blogs if they suit your interest. I've had a great year snacking at the science news buffet; now here comes the main course.