Student science writers from around the world have created a set of 52 stories from the World Conference of Science Journalists 2017, spanning most of the meeting’s sessions and creating a valuable reference archive for journalists in the U.S. and abroad. The reports, along with bios of the authors, are online at the WCSJ2017 Student... Read More
By Amelia Jaycen SAN FRANCISCO—Saul Perlmutter, a Nobel Prize–winning astrophysicist and cosmologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has spent a lot of his time ascertaining how quickly the universe is expanding. But he is also concerned with some down-to-earth issues, like the state of human interactions. As he watched public discussions unfold in the last... Read More
By Carolyn M. Wilke SAN FRANCISCO—Is fact-checking the future of journalism? That question, at once disturbing for our society and promising for the increased role science journalists might play in combating fake news, drove a panel discussion among four experts on 30 October at the World Conference of Science Journalists 2017. The panelists, all experienced... Read More
SAN FRANCISCO—Science podcasts are more popular than ever. Producing them takes time, technical savvy, and a deep passion to engage listeners with material that is both informative and fun. How does one start a science podcast and build a dedicated audience? Those topics drew an enthusiastic crowd on 27 October at the World Conference of... Read More
By Liz Kimbrough SAN FRANCISCO—When South African student journalist Sibusiso Biyela sat down to write about the launch of the MeerKAT telescope in both English and Zulu, he thought it would be simple. The English version rolled out smoothly. But when he began to translate into Zulu, his native language, he found he would have... Read More
By Sergio Villagrán BERKELEY, California—On 13 November, a letter signed by more than 15,000 researchers, titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” appeared in the journal BioScience. Coming 25 years after the first such warning from the scientific community, the letter notes how little we have done to stop the negative environmental trends... Read More
By Inés Gutierrez SAN FRANCISCO—For quite some time, the words “the future is now” have been chasing us. Our collective imagination envisions a tomorrow filled with holograms, interactive media and 3D images. But when we look around, we realize that day may not come soon. However, one thing has visibly changed: digital content is more... Read More
By Omnia Gohar SAN FRANCISCO—“Big data,” so central to modern physics and astronomy, offers the potential to revolutionize medicine as well. Vast archives of biomedical information could already include the data needed to diagnose and treat many diseases, said computational health scientist Atul Butte of the University of California, San Francisco, on 26 October at... Read More
By Annie Roth SAN FRANCISCO—We all know climate change increases the severity of tropical storms, but what about Twitter storms? According to Solomon Hsiang, director of the Global Policy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, climate change is destabilizing both economies and emotions across the globe. During an eye-opening lecture titled “Economic Inequality, Violence,... Read More
Text and photos by Jesús Antonio Pascual Álvarez POINT REYES STATION, California—On a bright October day, the Point Reyes National Seashore seems clean and unspoiled. But it is steadily invaded by trash from the San Francisco Bay Area and Asia, said integrative biologist David Ackerly of the University of California, Berkeley, during a field trip... Read More
By Sibusiso Biyela SAN FRANCISCO—Wilfred Ndifon of Cameroon solved a 70-year-old immunology conundrum. Bernie Fanaroff of South Africa established the Fanaroff-Riley classification of radio galaxies and quasars. And Noble Banadda of Uganda uses mathematical models to predict what will happen during the many disease outbreaks in Africa. Chances are you’ve never heard of these scientists,... Read More
Thank you for attending WCSJ2017! We’re excited to have welcomed 1,364 registered attendees—from more than 70 countries—to San Francisco for WCSJ2017.
