KSJ News & Events

These days, when you visit a seaside village full of scientists, there’s one obvious question to ask them: What is humanity doing to the oceans – and by extension, to the whole planet?

That question breaks down into a thousand other concerns: How would an unusually intense storm like the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 affect residents of the East Coast today? How long do the disastrous effects of oil spills really linger? Can we tweak Earth’s own natural systems to scrub the atmosphere of excess carbon dioxide? (Probably not fast enough to keep up with carbon emissions, unfortunately.)

If there was a dominant theme to last week’s KSJ trek to Woods Hole, MA, the challenge of climate change was it. Like so many classes of Knight Fellows before them, the 2014-15 Fellows spent two nights and two days in Woods Hole, visiting the town’s twin giants: the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. (Not to mention Captain Kidd and Landfall.) A parade of top local researchers turned out to talk with the Fellows, including [Jerry Melillo](http://www …

Science used to be the broccoli of popular culture, something you had to trick people into consuming. Now it’s more like kombucha: suddenly cool, and for reasons that are still only vaguely understood.

That’s among the themes of yesterday’s MIT News Q&A with John Durant, director of the MIT Museum, and David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and director of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, about their recent report on the September 2013 special event The Evolving Culture of Science Engagement.

Observes Durant:

There is a tremendous proliferation of new forms of science engagement. Back in the day, you were really talking about journalism, public lectures, radio or television documentaries, museum and science centers, and not terribly much more. But today we have people doing stand-up comedy based around matters scientific; We have storytelling initiatives, with people converging in pubs and clubs to hear scientists talking about their own lives and their work; and we have people who are having extraordinary success with science in social networks, on YouTube, and so on…One of the most disconcerting qualities about it — and I’m being tongue-in-cheek — is that a lot of it seems rather cool.

The 2013 conference, which was supported by the Knight Science Journalism program as well as the Noyce Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Intel, the Wellcome Trust, and several other offices and departments at MIT, was designed to begin a conversation and an investigation into the roots of these changes. Conventional top-down approaches to improving “public understanding of science” – think science museums and newspaper science sections – are now being supplemented, sometimes even eclipsed, by everything from animated YouTube series like Minute Physics to …

Did you think podcasting was dead? Not by a long shot. In an extensive Nieman Storyboard post last week, Knight alum Cynthia Graber (2012-13) chronicles “the remarkable resurgence of podcasting” underway over the last few years, and what it might mean for the “tribes” of engaged listeners who can gather around niche topics like astronomy or architecture.

Back in 2006, Graber notes, only 11 percent of survey respondents had ever listened to a podcast. Now it’s up to 30 percent. Remarkably, 39 million Americans have listened to a podcast in the past month, according to data Graber obtained from Edison Research.

“Digital audio can reach a niche audience with a sound that inspires community and a passionate fan base,” she observes. A fan base of 50,000 or 60,000 probably wouldn’t be enough to keep the lights on at a major NPR radio show, but it’s often enough to sustain a podcast—especially if those listeners they’re willing to contribute financially, through Kickstarter or other fundraising mechanisms.

Graber, who contributes regularly to Scientific American’s 60-Second Science podcast, looks at the growth of other …

What better way to kick off the Ask Me Anything column at Hippo Reads, the new Santa Monica, CA-based publisher of academically inclined essays, than to put some cosmic questions about the shape of the universe and the feasibility of time travel to a theoretical physicist? And who better to serve as the inaugural Hippo Reads AMA respondent than a physicist who’s also an award-winning writer and historian?

I speak, of course, of David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at MIT and Department Head at the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (the Knight program’s home department at MIT). In addition to his STS duties, Prof. Kaiser is a senior lecturer in MIT’s Physics department, where he co-leads a group with Prof. Alan Guth focused on inflationary cosmology, the events that occurred in the first few fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Hippo Reads assistant editor Benjamin Winterhalter tapped Prof. Kaiser for the AMA honor after seeing him on physicist Brian Green’s recent NOVA special Fabric of the Cosmos.

Under the Ask Me Anything format, developed to a fine art by the social news …

The Energy and Climate Change Bootcamp is part of an ongoing series of short courses created by the KSJ program, which each year admits 13 exceptional, mid-career science journalists from around the world. The Fellows spend a full academic year at MIT honing their science reporting skills, and working alongside scientists and researchers in MIT labs. The only one of its kind in the world, the program has run for 31 years and created 320 alumni who are now continuing their science writing at major news outlets in 40 countries. Four times a year, the KSJ program offers the intensive bootcamps, which are attended not only by the Fellows, but also by other journalists who apply to participate.

Full Article at MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

The Tracker publishes reviews and critiques of science articles to help educate the public about quality science journalism reporting, while simultaneously elevating the reporting bar for science journalists. SHASS Communications recently spoke with Paul Raeburn, MIT Physics SB ’72, and the KSJ Tracker’s Chief Media Critic, about the goals of the Tracker and the most prevalent issues in science reporting today.

Full Article at MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.