Happy new year to all of our readers – I hope 2017 brings you love, literature and science-y goodness.

By coincidence, two of our last three pieces of fiction have involved our eight-legged friends. First, Dom Stiles (our intrepid lab lit “sniffer”) contributed an intriguing piece called Catastrophic cascade which involved an uncomfortable number of bugs and spiders. And today, we’ve published a fabulously understated story about spiders by Emma Grygotis, Arachnophage. Both of these are debut fiction contributions, which we welcome happily.

We also published The family skeptic by regular contributor Becky Nesbit, which is about climate change denialism – with a clever family twist.

We are currently in the midst of compiling the next upgrade to the LabLit List, which should be ready in early February. We’ve got a satisfyingly large number of suggestions to sort through, so it should be another big one!