The Why Files: The Science Behind the News, one of the oldest popular science websites, ceased publication on Jan. 21, roughly the 20th anniversary of its birth as an experiment in the nascent technology once called the World Wide Web. The cause of death was a university-wide belt tightening at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Science writing news
Known for its innovative research in cancer, neuroscience, plant science and genomics, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory recently marked its 125th anniversary. In The Road to Discovery: A Short History of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Jan A. Witkowski strives to make that history come alive by portraying the work of individual scientists and their contributions to the development of biomedical science and biotechnology. The book includes more than 300 illustrations, plus resources for further reading.
Here are some words and phrases you have probably been misusing: comprise, fulsome, foundering, begging the question. Here are some others: comorbidity, latent construct, hierarchical stepwise regression, principal components factor analysis. That second list comes from a review titled “Fifty Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid: a List of Inaccurate, Misleading, Misused, Ambiguous, and Logically Confused Words and Phrases”, which was published in Frontiers in Psychology by researchers from Emory University, Sacred Heart College, Georgia State University, and SUNY–Binghamton.
In Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens, Steve Olson focuses on the 57 people killed in the volcano’s eruption, the morning of Sunday, May 18, 1980. Those who lost their lives included volcanologists, loggers, conservationists, and other area residents, some as far as 13 miles from the summit. Had it been a weekday, Olson notes, far more people would have died, as hundreds of loggers would have been working in the area.
Over recent years, more and more research institutions seem to be adopting a corporate marketing approach to their communications. You can recognize these marketers by their use of such buzzwords as branding, messaging, market penetration, and cost-benefit analysis. It’s an approach that risks compromising research communications, and more broadly a research institution’s missions to create and disseminate knowledge. But corporate marketing is by definition shallow marketing. By aiming to sell the institution as a branded product, it fails to serve the intellectually rich marketplace of ideas in which researchers operate.
Melissa Sevigny interviewed more than 50 scientists engaged in solar system exploration, asking each of them to describe the first moment they saw a new world revealed. Their first sights ranged from the Moon to Mars, from asteroids to the moons of asteroids, and more. In Under Desert Skies: How Tucson Mapped the Way to the Moon and Planets, Sevigny shares their “inexhaustible sense of wonder.” Minor Planet (15624) Lamberton is named for Sevigny, who earned the honor as Melissa Lamberton in 2001, when she was a finalist in the Discovery Young Scientist Challenge, a middle school science competition.
NASW helped 10 undergraduates majoring in biology, English, physics, journalism, mathematics, neuroscience, and environmental studies by awarding them fellowships to attend the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As part of their fellowship obligations, the students filed reports on selected AAAS sessions. You can read their reports on our event coverage page.
Good essays have much in common with good science, in that both start with a question, Michelle Nijhuis asserts in The Science Writers’ Essay Handbook. Narrated in a personal voice, essays involve one or more journeys, and are relevant to both writer and reader, she says, telling how to organize, write, and self-edit essays, and where to find outlets for publication or broadcast. Nijhuis was a co-author of The Science Writers’ Handbook, published in 2013. NASW Idea Grants helped support development of both books.
What sense is most closely associated with emotions? How much skin does a person shed in one year? Why is it difficult to remember dreams? If you often seek health factoids for articles on medical topics, The Handy Anatomy Answer Book belongs on your bookshelf. NASW member Patricia Barnes-Svarney and her husband, Thomas Svarney — co-authors of several science “Answer Books” — provide hundreds of Qs & As covering all organ systems, as well as basics of physiology.
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