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 Félix Reskala SAN FRANCISCO—There is a problem in science: Scientists often can’t reproduce the results of their colleagues. More than 50% of researchers feel this poses a major problem for the field, according to a survey last year in Nature. To address what this issue means for science journalists, prominent editors and scientists convened... 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 Andjela Djuraskovic SAN FRANCISCO—Robots, takeovers by artificial intelligence, and high-tech jobs of the future: Those were the expected topics from a panel of Silicon Valley speakers at a session called “The Future of Work.” But to the surprise of the audience, the experts wanted to talk politics. The panel convened on 26 October at... 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
Text and photos by Amelia Jaycen BERKELEY, California—A group of eager writers attending the World Conference of Science Journalists 2017 stood on an upper platform at Berkeley’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) research lab. Under their feet, electrons raced at nearly the speed of light. Overhead, an iconic domed ceiling—the same ceiling under which Nobel laureate... 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.
