Articles

Melissa L. Sevigny: Mythical River

An assignment to write about an imaginary river in the American Southwest, sought for decades by 18th and 19th century explorers, fur trappers, and pioneers, sparked Melissa Sevigny’s interest in modern-day efforts to bring more water to the Colorado River Basin. In Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest, Sevigny tells those stories, and explores the challenges of making an ethical home in a desert.

We will miss you, Peggy

It is with sadness that we share the loss of a very special woman, talented journalist, and active NASW board member, Peggy Girshman. She died suddenly yesterday on March 14, 2016. Peggy had been attacking a diagnosis of amyloidosis for the last several years and, according to her husband Mitch Berger, “Peg went out like a true journalist, at her desk, writing (while also playing Scrabble online with her arch-nemesis, my brother Dan). Let the record show that she was winning.”

From ScienceWriters: Budget cuts claim The Why Files

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.

Jan A. Witkowski: The Road to Discovery

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.

From ScienceWriters: What’s the right way to talk about psychology?

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.

Steve Olson: Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens

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.

From ScienceWriters: PIO Forum: Ideas are not soap

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 L. Sevigny: Under Desert Skies

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.

Reports from our NASW student travel fellows to AAAS 2016

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.

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