A few days ago we woke up to the news that the New York Times is eliminating their environment desk. Predictably, the immediate reaction of many was “oh, noooo!”. After all, whenever we hear such news, about a science or health or environmental desk being eliminated at a media organization, this means the reporters and [...]

If you are a really regular, diligent reader of this blog, you may remember back in September when I announced a panel I have organized for the next year’s WCSJ2013. The eighth World Conference of Science Journalists, organized by World Federation of Science Journalists will be held in Helsinki, Finland on June 24-28th, 2013, and [...]

If you read my old and new posts about the media, science journalism, etc., you know I come down strongly on the side of specialists and against generalists. But it is a caricature, a simplification I have to use to make my posts clearer, and to cut my posts down to a semi-manageable length Yes, [...]

Nate Silver is now a meme (also source of the image on the left). I usually pepper my posts with links, but today I feel lazy, so I listed a bunch of links at the bottom – hours of fascinating reading you can have after you read my post! Who is Nate Silver? Nate Silver [...]

If you are not a vertebrate paleontologist, or play one on TV, what do you think vertebrate paleontologists do? If you were a kid who knew all dinosaur names, but now only remember that period occasionally when paleontology appears in the media, what would you expect you’d hear if you suddenly appeared at the annual [...]

Which topic are science journalists most likely to talk about when they get together? A) The epistemological issues raised by multiverse theories; B) The revival of social Darwinist ideas in Tea Party rhetoric; C) The relevance of experiments on sea slug brains to the debate over free will; D) Statistical evidence linking global warming to [...]

Some go to school to become journalists. Others hit the road with a notebook, camera and insatiable curiosity, while others have a shocking moment of awareness of the complexity of the human condition and want to document it. I decided to enter the field when a war journalist showed me a roll of images from [...]

History is littered with private indiscretions made public—some have just been more public than others: · It is believed the Leonardo da Vinci was a passionate instructor to his students; one in particular remained in da Vinci’s favor for 26 years. · Cleopatra made no secret of the nature of her political alliances, which included [...]

Communicating science is all about telling stories. A few days ago at the World Science Festival, a stellar panel of science journalists and writers sat down to discuss the ways in which the Web is shaping and changing how those stories are told. Moderating the "Telling Science Stories in Print and on the Web" discussion [...]

For anyone with an interest in journalism, it’s no surprise that Fox News Channel and the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal lean well to the right. Editorially, these two jewels of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. have a long history of denying human-induced global warming, in keeping with certain ideological interests. New data support [...]

“Superwoman has been rumbled,” declared a Daily Telegraph article in 2001 that chronicled how the human brain’s inability to “multitask” undercuts the prospects for a woman to juggle career and family with any measure of success. The brain as media icon has emerged repeatedly in recent years as new imaging techniques have proliferated—and, as a [...]

As the Blog Editor at Scientific American, I come to New York City about once a month to work in the office, attend editorial meetings, and prepare the blog network for launch some time in the near future. This week, I was in town at just the right time to join our intrepid team of [...]

Social media has scored big successes in helping crowds to gather and communicate online to challenge oppressive regimes in recent weeks, but digital gathering places that are basically public—and the crowd-sourced data they generate—also carry risks. Crowds are forming so rapidly online—the photo-sharing app Instagram reported enrolling one million users in the past six weeks—that [...]

DURHAM, North Carolina­­­­—TV pundit and Washington Post columnist George Will has a history of misrepresenting climate science—and it’s bloggers who typically make sure the record is set straight on such points. For instance, a 2009 Will editorial in the Washington Post asserting, among other things, that the extent of global sea ice today is the [...]

Human #1: "Hello, nice weather today, isn’t it?" Human #2: "Ummm…actually not. It’s a gray, cold, windy, rainy kind of day!" Many a joke depends on confusion about the meaning of language, as in the example above. But understanding the sources of such confusion is important in realms other than stand-up comedy, including in the [...]

So Superstorm Sandy comes and pretty much knocks everybody on their butts – and then what? Where to go? Shelters? Food? Which streets are open, and which are flooded? Is somebody dropping off blankets or chain saws somewhere? When? According to Julie Macie, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina working towards a [...]

“If you put an image online, expect it to be stolen.” “I got it from Google Images; it’s free.” “Why do you care if people steal your work? It’s free exposure.” Illustrators, photographers artists and painters have likely all heard these lines or ones like them before. As the information-carrying capacity of the internet has [...]

I just did something that I’m sure is not on any “helpful tips” list for aspiring science bloggers. To write this post, I just copied a title from an academic journal and hit <CTRL> V in the headline field of WordPress. I wouldn’t usually do a cut and paste, but this title brought a big [...]

An artist drew dozens of self-renderings while under the influence of varying drugs, and the series has found its way to a scrollable media platform where it’s touted as “all kinds of cool”. Check it out. Commenters congratulate the artist; point out hilarity they find in some of the work; empathize with some of the [...]

I have a perpetual burr in my side on aspects of drug and addiction coverage. It’s hard to expect altruism in every avenue of journalism (innumerable slideshows about Katie Holmes prove the fallacy of that wish), but I want to outline problems in public health coverage I see now and again, in hopes that we [...]