People choose what they celebrate. I think any communal holiday I celebrate should have significance to our prosperity and well-being, and few single words better express the path to those precious ends than science. Without science – if you and I existed at all – we may not have our health, our communications or travel, or these devices and networks by which we know and learn from each other. We might see the night sky, but never know what we were seeing. We might see each other, but never know what we’re made of.

My tradition is to share a post each day for seven days about any aspect of science I love: any idea, discovery, figure, et cetera. The first day is February 12 – the calendar birth of Charles Darwin, whose introduction of evolution, as do many other examples, typifies the spirit of science for me.

This is the first year I’ll have done this directly on my home site! That feels especially nice to me. But I’ll share everything on Twitter, and I invite you to do the same. “Science Week” is used in other senses, but I’ll use the hashtag “#ScienceWeek” in this case. If you post anything, let me know and I’ll link to you.

See you on February 12! And as always: here’s to finding things out.