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 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
By Liz Kimbrough SAN FRANCISCO—When the sexual harassment case of astronomer Geoffrey Marcy of the Univerity of California, Berkeley, came across her desk at BuzzFeed News, science reporter Azeen Ghorayshi was well equipped to break the story. Buzzfeed’s newsroom and legal team had years of experience handling sexual assault and sexual harassment stories on university... 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 Jeremy Rehm SAN FRANCISCO—Our immune system’s actions resemble yours when you drive a car. It presses the “gas” enough to attack and kill foreign microbes or cancer cells, but it also steps on the “brake” to prevent killing everything—including you. When scientists in the 1990s first discovered chemicals that control this balance, it paved... 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 Alex Fox BERKELEY, California—Too often, the most pressing environmental issues faced by humankind fade away when the news cycle ends. Without breaking news to inject them back into coverage, these stories can dwindle even as their impacts intensify. But there are reliable ways for journalists to forge compelling stories at any time from ongoing... Read More
