Matt Shipman, a university public information officer, wrote the book he wished he’d had when he started his career.
What happens when you cross a beloved and compelling theory, a bevy of intensely competitive experiments on a highly technical subject, with a top-secret press conference, tight deadlines, and the desire to tell an exciting story? Perhaps you get the ascent and fall of BICEP2.
Cambridge, Mass., isn’t simply the home of top research universities like MIT and Harvard. Acre for acre, the Kendall Square area around MIT boasts the highest density of academic, corporate, and startup R&D activity in the world. The Brookings Institution calls Kendall Square “today’s iconic innovation district.” All of which makes it the perfect setting for ScienceWriters2015, coming to MIT Oct. 9-13. Also, NASW and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing will host the 10th World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ) in fall 2017 in San Francisco.
In Networking for Nerds, Alaina Levine offers tips on why and how to network to both early-career and established scientists and engineers.
"There has been a spate of research papers recently about how and why different audiences acquire and react to news; sometimes about science and sometimes about news more generally," Rick Borchelt writes. "Two captured my attention for what they can offer science communicators as we daily confront changes in the news landscape."
As Raphael Rosen explains in Math Geek, mathematics permeates everyday life, from the shapes of broccoli to the bunching of buses on their routes.
The work of science exposition calls for people who make a career of it, Victor McElheny writes. They must have a course of development to follow, as a serial entrepreneur like George Scangos, the CEO of Biogen Idec (to choose an example from the particularly strident atmosphere of biotechnology), could tell us. Careers, accumulations of experience, imply structures with standards. And science journalists have to be more like intellectuals than most journalists. They have to stay at it longer to get good.
According to surveys taken by bar associations, only a third of all persons with property to pass after they die have wills. What happens if you’re too busy or superstitious to write a will that spells out who is to get what upon your death? When you die without a will (intestate, in legalese), your assets pass in accordance with your state’s intestacy laws, Julian Block explains.
Over $11,000 has been awarded to ten recipients in the most recent round of Career Grants offered by the National Association of Science Writers. Open to all established science writers, whether freelancers or employees of publications, universities, or other organizations, the Career Grants award up to $2,500 for projects that aim to increase the overall scope of the person's career opportunities. Read more to see the list of recipients.
Prominent scientists, science communicators, and skeptic activists, including Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” physicist Lawrence Krauss, Cosmos co-creator Ann Druyan, and many others are calling on the news media to stop using the word “skeptic” when referring to those who refuse to accept the reality of climate change, and instead refer to them by what they really are: science deniers.
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