Announcements

You can say that you care about accurate, compelling science storytelling, and that you’re concerned about science journalism’s future as a profession. You can talk about the best ways for journalists to get scientists to open up about their work, or about the need in newsrooms to master interactive tools and big data and capitalize on social media. But who’s out there on the Web actually writing about these things, week in and week out?

The Open Notebook, that’s who.

Since 2010, the non-profit website has been providing educational tools and resources to sharpen the professional skills of science journalists at all experience levels. It’s home to detailed interviews with science journalists who dissect their own story-creation process, deep reported features on the challenges of the craft, “day in the life” features where science journalists share their habits and tricks, and even an advice column and a pitch database giving examples of successful feature queries.

It’s a fantastic resource for science journalists, whether they’re veterans or greenhorns. Yet it’s all a labor of love on the part of co-founders Siri Carpenter and Jeanne Erdmann—who act as the …

If you’re a science or health journalist and you’re interested in what researchers are learning about the brain, there’s only one place to spend June 11 and 12, 2015: right here in Cambridge, at the offices of the Knight Science Journalism program.

That’s where you’ll meet eight top Boston-area neuroscience and cognitive science researchers as part of Frontiers in Brain Science: The Kavli Science Journalism Workshop.

And if you move fast, there’s still time to apply for a $750 travel stipend to attend; the deadline is April 10. The travel funding comes courtesy of our valued partner, the Kavli Foundation.

We shared a preview of the workshop on March 1. Today I’m excited to tell you about the terrific researchers we’re bringing in to share the latest news about their work. They’ll help the assembled journalists explore (and sometimes explode) modern notions about the ingredients of consciousness and intelligence.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University; a research scientist at the Martinos Center for …

One day last October, the current group of Knight Science Journalism Fellows called me into our sixth-floor conference room here at Building E19 and told me they wanted to share a concern. They were looking at our lineup of fall KSJ seminar speakers, and they were seeing a serious preponderance of men.

In a place like Boston/Cambridge, with its large community of women scientists and engineers, the Fellows politely asked, shouldn’t it be possible to recruit at least an equal number of male and female speakers?

At a university like MIT, where women made up 46 percent of the entering undergraduate class last year, what kind of message did it send, exactly, that only four of our 21 fall speakers, or 19 percent, were women?

When I realized what I’d done, I was mortified. Our twice-weekly seminars, which feature Boston-area scientists doing cutting-edge research as well as top practitioners from the worlds of journalism and publishing, are the most important part of the KSJ curriculum. Recruiting great seminar speakers is one of the main jobs of the Knight director, and it requires attention to a number of factors, including balance across scientific fields and, yes, across genders.

The truth was …

Will Boston succeed in its ambitious, $4.5 billion proposal to host the 2024 Summer Olympics? Sports fans will have to wait a couple of years for the International Olympic Committee to decide.

But meanwhile, if there’s anything close to the Olympic Games in science journalism, the Boston area has already won it.

Several years ago, Knight Science Journalism at MIT put in a successful bid to host ScienceWriters2015—and now the event is just around the corner.

We couldn’t be more thrilled about the opportunity to welcome the best minds in our profession to Cambridge, and to showcase research and innovation at MIT and other Boston-area institutions.

But to make the meeting a success, we’re going to need all the help we can get from local friends and supporters. So with this note, I wanted to provide some updates about the meeting, and invite the local science writing community to start sharing ideas.

After successful recent conferences in Research Triangle, NC, Gainesville, FL, and Columbus, OH, Science Writers—which, as everyone knows, is an annual joint meeting organized by the National Association of Science Writers and the …

It’s often said that the human brain is the most intricate structure in the known universe. That may or may not be true—whale and dolphin brains are pretty amazing, too. But thanks to major advances in imaging and neuromodulation technologies, we do know much more about the brain’s workings, and its failings, than we did just a few years ago.

Using tools like functional MRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation, for example, neuroscientists are able to …