At its inception, the organization originally
known as Science Service planned to provide
news of the latest scientific research to established syndicates for distribution to newspapers
and other media. But the syndicates weren’t
that interested. One offered to buy 400 words’
worth of science news a day, at three cents a
word. That deal didn’t last long.
Fortunately, plan B was more successful.
Science News Bulletin, a weekly mimeographed
compilation of science news items, was mailed
to newspapers across the country. Soon individuals, libraries and schools inquired about
subscribing to the bulletin directly; with a few
embellishments, it was repackaged and sold
to subscribers as the Science News-Letter
beginning in March 1922.
In the years that followed, Science News Letter
(first losing the hyphen, then the Letter) became
the nation’s leading source of comprehensive
accounts of science in action. In its pages readers learned of the bizarre new view of the atom
posed by quantum mechanics, the arrival of
antibiotic wonder drugs, surprising new subatomic particles and the splitting of the atom.
Household words today were once neologisms
introduced to many through Science News articles: pulsar, transistor, DNA, laser. Science News
reported the play-by-play of the space race,
the arms race and the detective work revealing
the evolution of the human race. Faithful readers
have encountered quarks and quasars and
quantum computing; genetic engineering and
genome sequencing; black holes, brown dwarfs
and buckyballs; CFCs and global warming; dark
energy, dark matter and water on Mars; stem
cells and Dolly the Sheep; countless images
from the Hubble Space Telescope and accounts
of the planet Pluto’s discovery and its demotion
from planetary status.
Read on for other examples. You’ll find that
for the last 90 years, Science News has truly lived
up to its name. — Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
On the Web To read archival Science News stories (dates in
italics), subscribers can find links at www.sciencenews.org/90
Plumthearchives
As a freshman astronomy major, I was captivated by class discussions of black holes. Working at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium later that year, I asked a staff scien-
tist where I could learn more about wormholes, black holes
and event horizons. “You won’t understand the journal arti-
cles,” he said. “They’re essentially all math. I’d suggest Science
News. That’s where we go to read about them in plain English.”
Until then, I’d never encountered the magazine. But it has
been an integral part of my life ever since, including 34 years
as a staff writer and editor. So it was both a privilege and a
labor of love to thumb through archived issues dating back to
1922 to identify top stories from past decades of Science News.
