MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIE TY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC mAGAZiNe OF THe SOCie TY FOR SCieNCe & THe PUbLiC
PUBLISHER elizabeth marincola
EDITOR IN CHIEF Tom Siegfried
EDITORIAL
MANAGING EDITOR eva emerson
SENIOR EDITOR/POLICY janet Raloff
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR, NEWS matt Crenson
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR, FEATURES elizabeth Quill
DEPARTMENTS EDITOR erika engelhaupt
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ASTRONOM Y Nadia Drake
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES bruce bower
BIOMEDICINE Nathan Seppa
CHEMISTRY/INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES Rachel ehrenberg
LIFE SCIENCES Susan milius
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY Tina Hesman Saey
NEUROSCIENCE Laura Sanders
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SCIENCE WRITER INTERN meghan Rosen
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For news about science,
there’s one best place
In the aftermath of Higgs boson media
frenzy, it’s worth noting that for a few
days the world of journalism was focused
on the world of science. An esoteric
experiment involving scales of space,
time, energy and money far beyond the
usual scientific enterprise commanded
the attention of media of all stripes.
In the days leading up to the report of the new particle’s
discovery, the Twittersphere was full of rumors, guesses and
forecasts. But the actual news came first on the Science News
website, a day before the official announcement. Officials at
CERN, the European laboratory in charge of the Higgs search,
had mistakenly posted a video on the Web with one experiment’s spokesman describing the discovery of the new particle. In preparing for our coverage of the Higgs announcement,
associate editor Kate Travis spotted the video. Soon after we
reported its contents, other media scrambled to follow up the
story of the “leaked” video. But it hadn’t been leaked to anyone. It was just found through journalistic diligence.
Such diligence has been a hallmark of journalism at Science
News all the time, not just for the brief moments when the rest
of the media’s spotlights are focused on science. For anyone
who wants to know what scientists are finding out, Science
News has always been the magazine to read. Big stories like the
Higgs get covered everywhere, but it’s hard to find the rest of
the never-ending flow of science news anywhere but here.
In this issue, for instance, you’ll find out about the newest
moon of Pluto, a “sighting” of invisible dark matter in space
and an explanation for an old mystery about swirls of dust on
Earth’s moon. You’ll learn about new insights into the relationship between long-term climate change and short-term
weather events. You’ll get real archaeological science related
to the Maya apocalypse nonsense and get the latest about early
humans in North America. If your taste is biology, you’ll want
to check out the life span of spacefaring worms and the genetic
catalog of the banana. On the medical front, you can read about
a protein’s key role in lung cancer, recent work on the brain’s
role in chronic pain and a fascinating twist in understanding
amnesia, where memory loss may be tied to having too many
memories. And don’t forget the intersection of science and
society, where mathematical analysis of the war in Afghanistan
has led to robust predictions of where the most fighting will be.
It’s a great magazine, isn’t it?
—Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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