Where to Find Great Science Writing # 1

Without scanning dozens of summaries of Research Reports every day, where can the average person find great science writing ?

The answers may surprise you.  You might start by looking at any year's volume of  an annual series called "The Best American Science and Nature Writing.  Each volume contains a list of source publications from which its articles were drawn.  Where were most of the articles originally published ?  Here's the rundown for three recent volumes:

In the 2010 volume, edited by Freeman Dyuson, 8 of the 28 articles first appeared in a general interest magazine -- The New Yorker.  A close second was National Geographic Magazine, with 6 articles.  Surprisingly, only 2 articles appeared in Discover Magazine, a publication totally devoted to science. Other sources were  OnEarth (2 articles), The New York Review of Books (2), GQ Mazine (1), The New York Times (1), The Minnesota Conservation Volunteer (1), Living Bird Magazine (1), Orion (1), Wired (1),  Conservation Magazine (1), and The American Scholar (1).

Each annual volume has a different editor, so it is natural that each new annual editor will choose slightly different sorts of articles from a few different sources.  For instance, in the 2011 volume, only six articles come from The New Yorker.  Three come from Orion.  Two come from Outside.  Two come from Discover Magazine.  Two comes from Scientific American.  No articles come from National Geographic Magazine.  One comes from Slate.  Two come from The Atlantic Magazine.  One comes from Esquire.  One from Popular Mechanics.  One comes from "The New York Times" while another comes from "The New York Times Magazine."  One comes from Ecotone.  One comes from Wired.  And one comes from Smithsonian.

Check out this source for the best science writing around for laymen.

Undersea Volcano Video

Here a wonderful video of an undersea volcano off of Samoa erupting.  We owe our gratitude to the folks who made this one, taking us somewhere and showing us something almost all of us (except the makers) would never have seen.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/undersea-volcano-explodes-as-scientists-watch-video/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20150424

Simply Amazing Science -- What This Blog Is About

Simply Amazing Science

What This Blog is About

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In a 1959 essay, the British scientist C. P. Snow published an influential essay in which he commented as follows:

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

“I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”

Not a day passes when I do not discover one or more fascinating things about the world and the universe. Some people need drugs to send them upwards into a high, but I do not. I can get as high as I wish to be simply by studying and contemplating the world around us. I realized a short while ago that what interests me might interest thousands of people across the world, and so I decided to start this science blog.

I am not a scientist. My actual work in science is limited to a year or two of working for a medical testing laboratory, where I had the chance to peruse hundreds of highly specialized research articles. And much of my adult life has been spent studying a soft science, anthropology. Yet I have always been fascinated by science and have read continuously about various aspects of it.

While I am not on a mission to educate the world, I want to share much that I have learned.  In its own way, the Gauguin painting at the head of this blog may well symbolize our concerns, for surely it evokes man's wonder at the mystery of the universe.  Let us go together on this voyage, you and I.  Who knows what we'll discover ?  But we can be sure that the journey will be a great and fascinating one.

*  Gauguin—after vowing that he would commit suicide following this painting's completion, something he had previously attempted—indicated that the painting should be read from right to left, with the three major figure groups illustrating the questions posed in the title. The three women with a child represent the beginning of life; the middle group symbolizes the daily existence of young adulthood; and in the final group, according to the artist, "an old woman approaching death appears reconciled and resigned to her thoughts"; at her feet, "a strange white bird...represents the futility of words." The blue idol in the background apparently represents what Gauguin described as "the Beyond." [From Wikipedia]