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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 …