The Oklahoma tornado disaster was chilling in terms of sheer power and devastation caused. In this week’s picks, I highlight two articles about tornadoes. The first one, by Douglas Main, examines the underlying causes of such destructive tornadoes and the second one, by Adam Kucharski, looks at the challenge in forecasting seemingly unpredictable tornadoes. On [...]

This is a series of Q&As with young and up-and-coming science, health and environmental writers and reporters. They have recently hatched in the Incubators (science writing programs at schools of journalism), have even more recently fledged (graduated), and are now making their mark as wonderful new voices explaining science to the public. Today we introduce [...]

Protecting South America’s Crown of Biodiversity by Anne-Marie Hodge: Visiting a rainforest can be an exercise in challenged expectations. Everyone knows that rainforests are full of life: they teem with species, act as stages for unimaginably intricate food webs, and provide refuge for rare and even undiscovered organisms that exist nowhere else in the world. [...]

As usual, it’s been a great week on the writing front from up-and-coming science writers. This week’s selection has the horrifying, the less horrifying, the beautiful and the wow and important. From wasps that sorta kinda impregnate cockroaches after controlling their minds to Killer Whale attacks to the notorious politics in the “green energy” sector. [...]

As more and more science writing is done specifically for the web, the way science writers pen their stories is subtly and not-so-subtly changing. Writers are becoming increasingly conscious of search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media optimisation (SMO) for instance. And they are taking those into account as they write. Is this affecting science [...]

Working to save the mystery antelope that’s little bigger than a pet cat by Lacey Avery: Little is known about the silver dik-dik (Madoqua piacentinii) population that roams the dense coastal bushlands of eastern Africa, but experts are working to learn more about the mysterious species…. Deaths triple among football players, morning temperatures thought to [...]

“When Bill Gates walks into a bar… the average salary goes up.” – Popular geeky stats joke. I once heard a science editor at a rather well-known publication say, in public no less, that she has no idea what p-value* means. This came as a shock to me, a then-relative newcomer to the science communication [...]

This week we have barcoded ants, 3D printing fetuses, seals’ teeth, pseudoscience in the filter bubble and more. Let’s do this! – We’ve done it, people. We have barcoded ants. For science! The research is fabulously cool. Recounted by Kate Prengaman for Ars Technica. Barcodes let scientists track every ant in a colony For creatures [...]

Are you a super seer? Why some people see fewer colors than others and why women are more likely to be super seers by Naveena Sadasivam: It was the late 1700’s and John Dalton, now well known for his achievements in atomic theory, was walking by a store when he noticed a pair of stockings [...]

This is a guest post written by Nsikan Akpan, PhD, a health reporter at Medical Daily/International Business Times. He was formerly a science writer at the Center for Infection & Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health. He blogs at SciLogs.com and tweets as @ThatBS. – Everything changed on November 10, 2010. It was [...]