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 Sebastián Rodríguez SAN FRANCISCO—Science can bring us together in unexpected ways. Charles Darwin, for instance, figured out that we are all related to a common ancestor; James Watson and Francis Crick discovered that all organisms share the same genetic language, DNA. Today, a particle accelerator is playing the same role for scientists in the... Read More
By Jia Naqvi SAN FRANCISCO—Eleven days. That is all it took for E. coli bacteria in a lab demonstration to evolve protections against an antibiotic dose 1,000 times more concentrated than previously needed to kill them. The well-publicized 2016 experiment (see video below) pointed to the problem of ever-growing antibiotic resistance, fed by increased antibiotic... Read More
By Margarida Marques SAN FRANCISCO—Among climate-change skeptics, “wafflers” are stalling actions that can lead to solutions as they increasingly influence public debate and government policy. Allowing wafflers to take center stage in the debate is their willingness to state “humans may have something to do with climate change,” followed by the qualifying word “but”—meaning the process... Read More
By Rithy Odom To help science journalists better navigate the morass of statistics that supposedly hold discrete findings to some standard of reliability or truth, organizers of a World Conference of Science Journalists 2017 panel on separating statistical fact from fiction played to a full house of science communicators on 28 October. In the session,... Read More
By Kelsey Harper SAN FRANCISCO—She wasn’t trying to create a gene-editing tool that would change the world. Jennifer Doudna was just curious—and she really liked RNA. She hadn’t always loved it, though. Scientists initially thought RNA, DNA’s single-stranded sibling, was a “throwaway molecule,” which sounded to Doudna “like the most boring molecule imaginable.” But when... Read More
By Carolyn M. Wilke MOSS LANDING, California—Forget Mars. The next frontier in the search for undiscovered life forms may lie deep in the oceans of our own planet. Thousands of meters below the ocean’s surface, hulking underwater rovers probe the remote depths looking for mysterious creatures. “It really is like an alien landscape, but just... 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.
