We spend a large part of our lives reminiscing about the past.

Few activities are as quintessentially human as being on the cusp of falling asleep and suddenly be assaulted by a memory that has us relive an embarrassing episode that we thought long forgotten. Yet this ability to store and recall the past didn’t emerge so that we could cringe at our past ineptness. We use our memories all the time, from remembering where we parked our car, to cook today’s dinner, or to try and put a name to the face of the person who’s now talking to us as if we’d met before, even though we could swear up and down to never have seen that person before.

Our memory is a crucial aspect of our cognition, and we often bemoan when it fails us. Ask the student who failed an exam, or the husband who forgot to buy his wife a gift for her birthday and now finds himself having to sleep on the couch in repentance.

What if there was a place where people with the same interests as you hang out and talk about the things which you are so passionate about? What if there was a place on the Internet where you had free and easy access to the most insightful writers, the smartest researchers, and the most talented artists from all over the world?

This place exists. It’s called Twitter.

Learning is exhilarating, and science is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern civilization.

While these are not terribly exciting points to make, it is curious how much of a barrier there is between the public and the scientific papers which are the products of science.

Or rather, how much of a barrier there was.

Whatever obstacles there were in place, the Internet has burned them to the ground and fundamentally changed the informational inequalities that the old system promoted.