NBC science correspondent Robert Bazell is leaving the network after 38 years, TVNewser reports.
In an email to the staff, he wrote,...
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NBC science correspondent Robert Bazell is leaving the network after 38 years, TVNewser reports.
In an email to the staff, he wrote, "The best thing about television journalism is that you never do it alone. Everything is a cooperative effort. To all of you who have shared your wisdom, your talent, your hard work, all the good times and adventures and above all your friendship, I cannot begin to express enough gratitude."
Bazell will be joining Yale University as an adjunct professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.
I have run into Bazell often, at scientific meetings and elsewhere, and I know him to be a smart and hard-working reporter. Television isn't always kind to science stories that require intelligent and sometimes lengthy...
Word is that astronomers have just gotten the best, blotchy, and not particularly attractive map of the sky ever made. Now they can calculate more accurately than ever how old the universe most likely is (about 13.82 billion years instead of the previously estimated 13.73 billion years - which...
Word is that astronomers have just gotten the best, blotchy, and not particularly attractive map of the sky ever made. Now they can calculate more accurately than ever how old the universe most likely is (about 13.82 billion years instead of the previously estimated 13.73 billion years - which doesn't sound like much unless you write the difference out: ~100,000,000 years). They also can guess better what the ingredients for making the likes of us were that the Big Bang spat forth at this further but more precise time zero and other fabulous things that help us to know our place in big history.
In other words, something fairly important has happened in cosmology. A big press conference in Europe and dozens of papers submitted to the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics spill the beans. But it's not as though mankind just made contact with aliens, So festive as this makes many scientists the space to describe it in general media...
A new report on the state of American journalism found "a continued erosion of news reporting resources," and " a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into...
A new report on the state of American journalism found "a continued erosion of news reporting resources," and " a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands."
Those were among the many disturbing conclusions from the latest annual report on American journalism by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report was released earlier this week.
I wasn't inclined to make too much of the report, because it seemed a bit irrelevant to the news industry that I write about. In my opinion, there has never been as much science writing, or as much good science writing, as there is now. And I think that's true of the media generally, not just science journalism. I haven't been this excited about the news business since I was trying to claw my way...
One's pet peeves can be so boring in the ears of others. Undaunted, onward I trudge...
The American Geophysical Union's press office this morning sent out two press releases with email alerts. The first email hit my inbox at 8:04 a.m. Pacific:
- AGU: Cosmic Rays Indicate...
One's pet peeves can be so boring in the ears of others. Undaunted, onward I trudge...
The American Geophysical Union's press office this morning sent out two press releases with email alerts. The first email hit my inbox at 8:04 a.m. Pacific:
- AGU: Cosmic Rays Indicate Voyager 1 Has Left the Solar System
Followed at 1o:27 by this version (its link goes to the press release behind the email):
I went nuts at the first one. However, I went off half-cocked too. As nearly all space writers know, astronomy press releases commonly have two delivery routes. One is directly from the host institution if one is on its contact list, and the second is via the American Astronomical Society's p.r.-forwarding service. Its pio Rick...
NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next...
NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next, as the site is called, invited me to review it. On Feb. 28, Tim De Chant, the editor of NOVA Next, welcomed readers by saying NOVA would bring to the web the expertise and passion displayed it displays in its television show. This is how he described the venture:
NOVA Next will be focused on big stories, the sort you’re used to hearing from NOVA. We’ll have some of the biggest names in science, technology, and engineering giving us the inside scoop on...
Like many complicated concepts in science, the Higgs Boson is a challenge to explain, both for journalists and the scientists who try to help us. It would be a lot simpler if it were generally accepted that the Higgs Boson was important because it caused the big bang. If that were true it would seem almost...
Like many complicated concepts in science, the Higgs Boson is a challenge to explain, both for journalists and the scientists who try to help us. It would be a lot simpler if it were generally accepted that the Higgs Boson was important because it caused the big bang. If that were true it would seem almost justified to call it the God particle.
In a recent Tracker post I expressed surprise that CBS News made the big bang claim in this news story. I wondered where the author got this idea, since there was no direct attribution:
The Higgs boson is often called "the God particle" because it's said to be what caused the "Big Bang" that created our universe many years ago. The nickname caught on so quickly (even though scientists...
[Update: Includes mention of Carl Zimmer's excellent cover story in the current National Geographic, which I missed on my first go-around. Also, see Zimmer's Twitter stream, @carlzimmer, for a lot of discussion.]
An interesting day-long conference Friday with...
[Update: Includes mention of Carl Zimmer's excellent cover story in the current National Geographic, which I missed on my first go-around. Also, see Zimmer's Twitter stream, @carlzimmer, for a lot of discussion.]
An interesting day-long conference Friday with a lot of glittering scientific and environmental presenters got only a smattering of coverage, as far as I can tell. I was surprised; the conference promised not only to include a lot of interesting science, but also to raise a lot of tricky scientific and ethical issues. And it was webcast live all day Friday by its host, National Geographic, meaning reporters could have easily covered from anywhere.
Some might have been put off by the name, as I was. "TEDxDeExtinction," with its speed-bump capitals and slashing x's, works better as a graphic...
Update/Correction: Physicists Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler have pointed out that one physicist out there does claim that the Higgs Boson caused the big bang. That's Michio Kaku. Strassler and Carroll both disagree with Kaku's claim, as do several other physicists consulted for this post.
...Update/Correction: Physicists Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler have pointed out that one physicist out there does claim that the Higgs Boson caused the big bang. That's Michio Kaku. Strassler and Carroll both disagree with Kaku's claim, as do several other physicists consulted for this post.
For anyone following physics, it sounded odd to hear that the particle announced with much fanfare last summer is likely to be the long-sought Higgs Boson. After all, AAAS and other list-makers declared the discovery of the Higgs to be the breakthrough of 2012. And now they’re telling us it’s the Higgs as if that’s news?
There really was some news. Further work at CERN has shown the particle that’s very likely to be the Higgs is behaving as predicted. That came out at a meeting in Italy on March 6 and last week in a...
Three days ago the NYTimes's Kenneth Chang wrote up in solid style NASA's latest microscopic iteration of its endless parade of water-on-Mars-and-ain't-we-...
Three days ago the NYTimes's Kenneth Chang wrote up in solid style NASA's latest microscopic iteration of its endless parade of water-on-Mars-and-ain't-we-having-astrobiological-fun? press accouncements. At which, after reading not only that story but the 200-plus comments that the Times deemed fit to print that follow it, I find myself shaking head in wonder and dismay. What a stupefying mix of brilliance, dementia, waggish remark, and inability even to recognize humor that this fine newspaper's readership is cabable of generating by the torrent!
The news is of course worth covering even if the rover Curiosity on Mars has, far as I can tell, not yet profoundly changed the scientific view of Martian astrobiology. Its gist, as Chang summarizes things, is that maybe Mars has or had...
[Note: Emily Anthes and Dan Fagin are friends of mine, and Anthes and I share the same book editor. That would disqualify me as a reviewer, so please consider this merely a notice of books you might find interesting--not a review.]
GloFish, transgenic goats that secrete drugs in their milk, and an...
[Note: Emily Anthes and Dan Fagin are friends of mine, and Anthes and I share the same book editor. That would disqualify me as a reviewer, so please consider this merely a notice of books you might find interesting--not a review.]
GloFish, transgenic goats that secrete drugs in their milk, and an FDA that doesn't seem quite sure what it should do about a new Noah's Ark of exotic, genetically engineered animals are all characters in the new book by Emily Anthes entitled Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts.
Anthes catalogues the wide variety of beasts that might soon become commonplace if the government, animal activists, and the public can somehow decide what should be allowed and what shouldn't. Using monkeys and apes to supply organs for humans is taboo, Anthes writes, but what about pigs? Genetically engineered pigs can be sources of donor organs from which chemical "pig"...
A writer working with John Belushi's widow on a biography of Belushi says he can demonstrate that reporting by the legendary Bob Woodward of The Washington Post might get the facts right, but it distorts their meaning.
"How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve...
A writer working with John Belushi's widow on a biography of Belushi says he can demonstrate that reporting by the legendary Bob Woodward of The Washington Post might get the facts right, but it distorts their meaning.
"How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status? I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions," Tanner Colby writes in Slate. Colby says his work on the new Belushi biography put him in the position of essentially re-reporting Woodward's 1984 book ...
When a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis was accused by federal officials of falsifying data, Blythe Bernhard...
When a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis was accused by federal officials of falsifying data, Blythe Bernhard wrote a story for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch outlining the accusations. The student, Adam Savine, who "admitted to investigators that he exaggerated his findings," would not comment, and at first she could not get comment from the professor who supervised him. The university did not release its investigation of the student. So Bernhard didn't have a lot to go on. She covered the who, what, when, where, and why, and that was about all she could do.
But when she got in touch with the student's mentor, a Washington University psychology professor named Todd Braver, he...
[Corrects that victim of apparent suicide was lead author, not lab director.]
Peter Whoriskey's...
[Corrects that victim of apparent suicide was lead author, not lab director.]
Peter Whoriskey's tale of a whistleblower who was fired by Johns Hopkins Medical School drew me in right from the start.
The story, published on the front page of The Washington Post, began:
The numbers didn’t add up.
Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.
I love stories like this, and Whoriskey's lede promised a fascinating and disturbing mystery tale that I was looking forward to. I was...
Last Friday, the leftist television news program Democracy Now ended its Women's Day broadcast with an interview with Vandana Shiva, identified as an Indian feminist, activist, and thinker and the "...
Last Friday, the leftist television news program Democracy Now ended its Women's Day broadcast with an interview with Vandana Shiva, identified as an Indian feminist, activist, and thinker and the "author of many books." She talked about the effects on women of what she called "the world's violent economic order," which included, among other things, the sale of genetically engineered cotton seeds to Indian farmers. The transcript includes this comment:
In India...the collection of royalties from seed has led to Monsanto controlling 95 percent of the cottonseed supply, 95 percent through a monopoly, not through the choice of the farmers, as it’s often made out to be. Farmers are getting indebted because the price of seed jumped 8,000 percent, and there’s no option...
Two hundred and...
Among writers who call themselves essayists, creative nonfiction is thought of as a lower form of life. It is defined only by what it is not: not fiction. Tacking "creative" on nonfiction is an attempt to "cloak it with dignity," says the master essayist Phillip Lopate...
Among writers who call themselves essayists, creative nonfiction is thought of as a lower form of life. It is defined only by what it is not: not fiction. Tacking "creative" on nonfiction is an attempt to "cloak it with dignity," says the master essayist Phillip Lopate in his new book, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. (Lopate admits that his preference for the term "literary nonfiction" is "a bit of gratuitous self-praise.") When literary awards are passed out each year, he writes, they include "a healthy list of fiction writers and poets" and "one or two nonfiction writers, if that."
What, then, of journalism? Journalism happens to be nonfiction, at least when practiced legitimately, but it...
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