England's Queen Victoria, we know, changed the course of European history through her long, eventful reign. But she did so in different ways, including through her significant genetic contributions to European royalty, said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison addressing attendees of the 2009 CASW New Horizons in Science Briefing.
Event coverage
Primary tabs
Coverage begins in 2006 for the ScienceWriters meeting and 2009 for the AAAS meeting. To see programs for past ScienceWriters meetings, go to the ScienceWriters meeting site.
You have a product. You have clients. Your goal is to rake in the highest revenue for the lowest cost in the most time-efficient way you can. So how to succeed?
In this economy, science writers are looking for new outlets to write for. This was apparent as an overflow crowd heard editors talk on what they're looking for in potential writers at the session "Pitching Science to Non-Science Magazines" at ScienceWriters 2009 in Austin.
Investigative reporting requires patience, perseverance, occasional travel and an employer willing to give you the time and resources required to uncover information that someone, somewhere, really doesn't want you to have, according to panelists at a session on investigative journalism at ScienceWriters 2009.
I expected the ScienceWriters 2009 workshop moderated by Robin Lloyd and Christie Nicholson, social media mavenettes working for Scientific American, entitled "Social Media — Why, Where and How," to cover the whole Social Media scene for me so that I'd perhaps see some value to it all. Social media was defined by Lloyd as places where "you receive, consolidate, share information." Regrettably the well publicized social media websites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn were barely mentioned. This session was a sales job for Twitter.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells in Texas siphon fossil fuel from the ground, sending it on to dozens of refineries and processing plants across the state. Yet it's not enough: The biggest energy hog and carbon emitter in the nation, Texas has to import additional oil to satisfy its fuel needs. "We're the China of America," Michael Webber, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas, told the 40 attendees at the 2009 CASW New Horizons in Science briefing in Austin. "We're the dirty, industrial heavy lifter."
Angry red trapezoids kill and eat the carcasses of their green kin. Critters turn blue to signal their desire to mate. Adults gobble their young. Welcome to Polyworld, the purported answer to one of the biggest unsolved problems in science: a theory of consciousness.
Recent research in nematodes, mice, and primates has shown that living on a severely reduced diet results in an unexpected benefit: longer lifespan. The constant, low-intensity stress from such diets might actually be helpful, shielding against even worse troubles, such as cancer. The downside is that, to enjoy these boons, an organism must cut its food consumption by a third.
A day-long game at ScienceWriters 2009 allowed NASW members to tackle head-on the question weighing heaviest on the minds of science writers everywhere: What is the future of our field? As a reflection of just how dire a media landscape fraught with so much unprecedented change has become, the game kicked off with the prediction of an exuberant deus ex machina.