1. Sunday, March 31 — Deadline for entries
American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism. The Perlman Award recognizes outstanding news reporting on the Earth and space sciences produced under deadline pressure of one week or less. The award consists of a $5,000 stipend and a plaque, and we now accept entries electronically (only), greatly simplifying the submission process. For further information about the award itself, see: http://bit.ly/VVKZAu. To go directly to the nomination form: click this link.

2. Friday—Sunday, April 5-7
Power of Narrative Conference, Boston University. Storytelling journalism goes digital: helping narrative journalists strengthen their craft, following the highest ethical practices and imparting the down-to-earth humanity that characterizes the genre.

3. Monday, April 15, 6 pm
Science Online Boston, Meadhall in Cambridge. The popular annual January ScienceOnline “unconference” in Raleigh, North Carolina, has a local presence with “tweetups” (in-person meetings) organized by NESW members Haley Bridger, Alberta Chu & Erin Podolak. This meeting features Eva Amsen from F1000 Research, who will speak about open access publishing. Join the #sciobeantown mailing list to receive updates about this and other events (http://bit.ly/XnwyDj).

4. Monday, April 22, 5:30—9:30 pm
Future of Food, The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts & WBUR. The first lecture in a series of three features panelists Michael Leviton (chef, Lumière and Area Four, Chefs Collaborative); Oran Hesterman (founder, Fair Food Network); Paul Greenberg (author of “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food”); and David Cleary (strategy director, agriculture, The Nature Conservancy). The Future of Energy happens on Monday, May 13 at 6:30 pm. The Future of Water will take place on Monday, June 10 at 6:30pm. Panels will be moderated by WBUR hosts, including Sacha Pfeiffer of All Things Considered. For press passes (limited), contact Misty Edgecomb, Senior Media Relations Manager, The Nature Conservancy, medgecomb@tnc.org.

Want to let NESW members know about more events of interest? Please add them to comment section below. Keep it short and sweet, with the basics and a link to more information.

Carol Morton (far left) leads the dancing

More than 800 science journos, students, PIOs, ands guests partied and networked Saturday, February 16 at the New England Science Writers reception for communicators covering the 2013 annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting.

Fresh from a day of AAAS presentations on everything from brain plasticity to cosmic microwaves to sparse phenomena, science writers were treated to panoramic nighttime views of a bejeweled Boston from the 50^th floor of the Prudential Tower. When not reserved for private functions, the well-windowed floor serves as the landmark building’s Skywalk Observatory.

Karen Weintraub (left) Claudia Dreifus (right)

The feast for the eyes was matched by the one for the palate.  The Kobe beef–Vermont cheddar sliders went fast. The servings of lobster salad on brioche rolls weren’t far behind. The mashed-potato martini bar lured many into carbo-loaded decadence.The Saturday evening event had dodged a wintertime Boston bullet: a major snowstorm just a week earlier led to a weekend travel ban and to cancellation of two events in the Skywalk space.

The dancing was a little slow in getting started. But by party’s end, the dance floor was jammed and jumping and the nearby windows steamed up. When DJ Scott Arrington of Murray Hill Talent tried to wrap things up with “Sexyback,”the went up: “One more song! One more song!” Arrington obliged with Flo Rida’s “Wild Ones.”

Andrew Moseman

Meanwhile, a group from CEMI Electronic Media Institute, based in nearby Somerville, was serving up science-themed video art spliced together with logos of the sponsoring institutions.

And no doubt: the gala was possible only through the generous contributions of our sponsors.

Glow sticks proved to be very popular party favors.  Neon-colored headdresses, necklaces, and bracelets were the fashion statement (and competition) for the evening.

As the party broke up, guests reunited with their coats—both coatrooms were filled to the max so late arrivals heaped their outerwear on the floor. Others queued patiently for the elevators. A few peeled off to thank-slash-praise for great time they had—and for the glow sticks.

***

Noelle Swan (left) Pete Spotts (right)

Richard Saltus chaired the NESW Gala committee, assisted notably by Carol Morton, Neil Savage, Susan Spitz, Peter Spotts, Noelle Swan, Thomas Ulrich, and Peter Wehrwein. Everyone contributed but Richard, Carol, Tom, and Noelle deserve a special shout out for making the party such a success.

Other committee members and gala volunteers included Mary Agner, Adrianne Appel, Trina Arpin, Lisa Drew, Marty Downs, Deborah Halber, David Holzman, Daniel Hudon, Joyce Peterson, and Karen Weintraub. Author Bill Sargent set up a table to display books by NESW authors.

A special thanks to Richard Tominsky and his superb catering staff at Top of the Hub Restaurant & Skywalk and to James Arthur, Mihai Dinulescu, Priscilla Graeff, Russell W. Hanson and their colleagues at CEMI Electronic Media Institute for the generative science art and interactive video displays.

And grazie mille to Deborah Perugi, who designed the fabulous flier and poster for the event.

Party flier designed by Deb Perugi.

This is Improbable: Cheese String Theory, Magnetic Chickens and Other WTF Research, by Marc Abrahams, OneWorld Publishing, paperback, Sept 16, 2012, ISBN 1851689311, 316 pages. Order it on Amazon.
• The founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony looks at international research that makes people laugh, then think.

Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating, by Leslie Brunetta and Catherine L. Craig, now in paperback (Feb. 2012) and all ebook formats (May 2010), Yale University Press, ISBN: 9780300181463. Order it on Amazon.
• The story of the evolution of spiders and their silks, which explains natural selection from gene to organism for non-biologists. Longlisted for Royal Society Winton Prize. Suitable for gardeners and Spider-Man fans alike. Perfect for creationist relatives.

Everyone’s Universe: A Guide to Accessible Astronomy Places (second edition), by Noreen Grice, July 1, 2012, You Can Do Astronomy LLC, ISBN-978-0-9833567-3-8. Order it on Amazon.
• Learn educational strategies for making astronomy events accessible and fun for all participants, and especially people who have physical or neurological disabilities. This book includes a state-by-state travel guide to accessible planetariums and observatories, with icons, photographs and descriptive text.

The Science Writer’s Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age, by the Writers of SciLance, edited by Thomas Hayden and Michelle Nijhuis, April 30, 2013, Da Capo Press, ISBN-10: 0738216569. Pre-order it on Amazon. Includes tips and suggestions from Jenny Cutraro, who will be writing for the book’s blog, as well as chapters by writers with New England connections, including Vermont-based writer Anne Sasso and former MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellows Hillary Rosner and Susan Moran.
• From structuring a story to dealing with envy, procrastination and loneliness, structuring your business to doing your taxes, 35 leading science writers go beyond the basics, sharing their hard-won wisdom and illuminating stories to help science writers of all levels survive and thrive in the new era of publishing.

Drawing the Map of Life: Inside the Human Genome Project, by Victor K. McElheny, now in paperback with a new afterword (June 2012) Basic Books, ISBN 978-0-465-02985-5, e-book, ISBN 978-0-465-03260-0. Order it on Amazon.
• The paperback edition of the history of the Human Genome Project has a 4,000-word update on the origins, accomplishments, and outcomes of biology’s entry into Big Science, carrying the story to the first uses of genomics in diagnosing and treating mystery disorders in children and advanced cancer cases.

Beach Wars; 10,000 Years on a Barrier Beach, by William Sargent. Strawberry Hill Press 2012, ISBN 9781475282634. Order it on Amazon.
• Starting when wooly mammoth and mastodon roamed New England’s shores and ending with the Cape Cod National Seashore’s demolition of houses endangered by sea level rise in 2012, this is the story how coastal erosion continues to shape our coasts. It tells the colorful story of rumrunners, mooncussers and pirates on Cape Cod’s everchanging outer beach. 150 pages with photographs and maps $15.95.

Fast Minds: How to Thrive If You Have ADHD (Or Think You Might), by Craig Surman, MD, and Tim Bilkey, MD, with Karen Weintraub, Feb 5, 2013, Berkley Hardcover, ISBN-10: 0425252833. Pre-order it on Amazon.
• Experts on adult ADHD blend their findings in neuroscience with real-life stories, bridging the gap between the clinical diagnosis and the actual experience of ADHD.

Sneak previews: Some other books by NESW members are in the production stages and not available yet, but here are the tantalizing descriptions by the authors.

The Skeleton Crew, by Deborah Halber, coming from Simon & Schuster in 2013, tells the story of a young Tennessee man whose obsession with a murder victim who died two years before he was born helps spawn an Internet subculture in which amateur sleuths defy the odds to match unidentified human remains with missing persons.

Light Work: Odd Excursions in Optics, by Stephen R. Wilk. To be published by Oxford University Press. A collection of Stephen R. Wilk’s strange and weird essays on optics and optics history, including such esoterica as Edible Lasers, Claudius Ptolemy’s Law of Refraction, The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Starbow, Where is that Tractor Beam, Zap! (A history of ray guns), and The Magic Lantern of Omar Khayyam.

Did we miss any? Add your suggestions below.

– Karen Weintraub & Carol Cruzan Morton

NESW member Bob Cooke (left) talks to HMS geneticist David Reich (right).

David Reich, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, talked to the New England Science Writers recently about what his genetic studies have revealed about the evolution of archaic and modern human populations.

Here is a report by Jeff Hecht, New Scientist correspondent and NESW steering committee member, who organized the Oct. 4 event with logistical support from David Cameron, HMS science communications director.

Reich’s work is based on analyzing the fragmentation of chromosomes and the rearrangements of genes that occur over many human generations. Comparing the degree of changes can tell us when two populations diverged, and how “archaic” populations have contributed to the ancestry of modern populations.

The research that has garnered Reich the most attention has identified the genomic connections archaic populations and modern humans. Mitochondrial DNA studies had found no evidence of interbreeding with Neanderthals. But results of his whole-genome sequencing research, reported in Science, shows that Europeans share about 1% of their ancestry with Neanderthals, with Asians having a little more and Africans having no significant share. Ongoing research seeks to pin down details.

Genomic sequencing by Reich has also identified a previously unrecognized group of archaic hominims that have been dubbed Denisovans because their fragmentary remains (a finger bone and two molars) were found in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberian. The Denisovans appear to have been a very small population. Reich’s group has found that among the populations now living, those who carry the largest amount of Denisovan genomic material are the aboriginal people of the Philippines, New Guinea, and Australia.

Reich’s landmark paper on Denisovans was published two years ago in Nature and he followed up with another paper last year in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

His group has also analyzed the genomes of natives of the Indian subcontinent since the end of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. Some 70 ethno-linguistic groups can be identified among modern Indian villages. All these groups are mixtures of two ancestral groups from northern and southern India, and Reich has discovered that the mixture occurred 80 to 180 generations ago, or roughly 1,700 to 4,000 years ago. He said this might be related to historic events and migrations into the region.

Debra Ruder, an NESW member, has an excellent piece about Reich and his research in the winter 2012 issue of Harvard Medicine magazine.

And here is a New York Times story that ran earlier this year about Reich’s research supporting a theory that North and South America were populated by three migrations from Siberia.

Carol Cruzan Morton introduces a panel whose online news operations are shaping the future of science journalism.

Boston-area science writers who have built online audiences through a variety of strategies and outlets shared their experiences at a January panel discussion sponsored by the New England Science Writers.

Making the leap from science writing and editing to the more entrepreneurial world of blogs and web presence requires new ways of doing things, business models, and creative staffing strategies. “You not only have to write the stories—you also have to sell them, over and over,” said Carey Goldberg, co-host of the CommonHealth blog (http://commonhealth.wbur.org) on Boston NPR outlet WBUR. CommonHealth blog became a general health news site in 2010 as part of a grant establishing a dozen blogs at local NPR stations. It covers the intersection of medicine, money and politics, including health care reform, medical innovation, and personal health. The blogging experiment convinced NPR leadership of the value in original reporting that originates on the web, Goldberg said.

Bob Buderi, former editor-in-chief of Technology Review, founded the tech business website Xconomy (http://www.xconomy.com) with a focused presence in six major cities. Buderi said he’s succeeded in attracting “underwriters and partners” (rather than advertisers) by offering them access to an “elite audience” of well-educated, high-profile individuals interested in innovation and who want to be associated with the content on the site.

Original in-depth content, targeted audience and (paid) savvy editorial management have helped build solid online news operations, according to (from left) Alison Bass, Ethan Zuckerman, Gabrielle Strobel, Carey Goldberg and Bob Buderi.

Gabrielle Strobel, executive editor of the Alzheimer Research Forum (http://www.alzforum.org) said that long-term philanthropic support (15 years) has made possible the community of researchers, patients, policy makers, and others that the free site has created. Among other things, it serves as a dynamic exchange of scientific questions and results. More than half of the audience are active Alzheimer’s researchers, most of whom use AlzForum as their home page.

The fourth panelist, Ethan Zuckerman, is the founder of Global Voices (http://globalvoicesonline.org), which uses a small, paid staff of part-time editors and scores of volunteer authors from around the world, bringing news and opinion from voices not ordinarily heard in the mainstream media. For example, Global Voices started covering the Arab Spring uprising on Dec. 20, 2010, three weeks before the New York Times picked up the story, Zuckerman said. Though not oriented toward science writing, Global Voices is an unusual model for aggregating content—and doing it with a minimal budget.

The future of health, science and technology journalism is being forged, in part, by several reporters and editors in the Boston area who have taken the lead in creating online news operations serving specific audiences in new ways.

Wednesday, 18 January 2011
MIT Faculty Club, Cambridge, Mass. (Dining Room East)
5:30 pm — Munchies and schmoozing
6:30 – 8:30 pm — Panel discussion

• Bob Buderi, founder of Xconomy (http://www.xconomy.com/) (@Xconomy)
• Carey Goldberg, co-host of WBUR CommonHealth (http://commonhealth.wbur.org/) (@commonhealth)
• Gabrielle Strobel, executive editor of AlzForum (http://alzforum.org/)
• Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Global Voices (http://globalvoicesonline.org/) (@globalvoices)
• Panel moderator: Alison Bass, health care blogger at http://alison-bass.com/blog/ (@AlisonBBass)

Some have figured out a way to become sustainable in a short time. Others are still searching for long-term viability. This event features journalists who have built robust audiences using different editorial strategies, staffing tactics and business models.

The panelists will discuss what works, what doesn’t work, and what’s changing. Hear their stories and discuss the ideas and experiences that are shaping the future of how people will be informed and engaged about health, science and technology for decades to come.

RSVP at https://web.memberclicks.com/mc/quickForm/viewForm.do?orgId=nesw&formId=112835
$15 for NESW members and 2011-12 Knight fellows
$20 for guest attendees
NOTE: Registration is limited to the first 100 people who RSVP online.

Organized by Carol Cruzan Morton (@carolmorton) and Alison Bass.
Thanks to Knight Science Journalism at MIT for providing the audiovisual equipment.

Wednesday, 18 January 2011
Building Online Communities in Health, Science and Technology News
MIT Faculty Club, Cambridge, Mass.

• Bob Buderi, founder of Xconomy
• Carey Goldberg, co-host of WBUR CommonHealth
• Gabrielle Strobel, executive editor of AlzForum
• Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Global Voices

• Panel moderator: Alison Bass, health care blogger

UPDATE (1/9/12): Register now at https://web.memberclicks.com/mc/quickForm/viewForm.do?orgId=nesw&formId=112835

Cost:
$15 for NESW members and 2011-12 Knight fellows
$20 for guest attendees

Didn’t get an email? We recently purged the member database of long-expired memberships and non-member event attendees.

To get back in the loop, click on the on the join button to the left to re-up your membership.

When: 2 pm, Saturday, June 18

Where: New Bedford Whaling Museum, downtown New Bedford ($10 per person at the door)

Who: Ocean engineer Hanumant Singh, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and
Marine biologist Kevin Stokesbury, School for Marine Science & Technology, UMass Dartmouth

Reception:  4:30-5:30 pm, at a pub up the street (cash bar).

RSVP: to organizer Ann Parson parson-a (at) verizon.net by June 14 (or call 508-984-1955). Parking & bus information upon RSVP.