Sarah Zielinski

Sarah Zielinski

Editor, Print at Science News Explores

Sarah Zielinski wanted to be a marine biologist when she was growing up, but after graduating from Cornell University with a B.A. in biology, and a stint at the National Science Foundation, she realized that she didn’t want to spend her life studying just one area of science — she wanted to learn about it all and share that knowledge with the public. In 2004, she received an M.A. in journalism from New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program and began a career in science journalism. She worked as a science writer and editor at the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the American Geophysical Union’s newspaper Eos and Smithsonian magazine before becoming a freelancer. During that time, she started her blog, Wild Things, and moved it to Science News magazine, and then became an editor for and frequent contributor to Science News Explores. Her work has also appeared in Slate, Science, Scientific AmericanDiscover and National Geographic News. She is the winner of the DCSWA 2010 Science News Brief Award and editor of the winner of the Gold Award for Children’s Science News in the 2015 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards, “Where will lightning strike?” published in Science News Explores. In 2005, she was a Marine Biological Laboratory Science Journalism Fellow.

All Stories by Sarah Zielinski

  1. Animals

    Delve into the history of the fight for Earth’s endangered creatures

    The new book ‘Beloved Beasts’ chronicles past conservation efforts as a movement and a science, and explores how to keep striding forward.

  2. Science & Society

    The board game Endangered shows just how hard conservation can be

    The new board game Endangered shows how working together is the only way for conservation to succeed.

  3. Animals

    Tiger sharks feast on migratory birds that fall out of the sky

    Terrestrial birds that fall from the sky during their migration across the Gulf of Mexico can end up in the bellies of tiger sharks.

  4. Animals

    How a tiger transforms into a man-eater

    ‘No Beast So Fierce’ examines the historical and environmental factors that turned a tiger in Nepal and India into a human-killer.

  5. Animals

    Poop provides a link in determining penguin diet from space

    Scientists have figured out what foods dominate an Adélie penguin colony’s diet by looking at Landsat imagery. But to do so, they had to start with penguin guano.

  6. Animals

    How a snake named Hannibal led to a discovery about cobra cannibalism

    Scientists discovered that cobras in southern Africa eat each other more often than thought. And that may be true for cobras in other places as well.

  7. Animals

    ‘Poached’ offers a deep, disturbing look into the illegal wildlife trade

    In ‘Poached,’ a journalist reports from the front lines of the illegal wildlife trade and shows how conservationists are fighting back.

  8. Animals

    A gentoo penguin’s dinner knows how to fight back

    Cameras attached to gentoo penguins off the Falkland Islands revealed that, despite the birds’ small size, their lobster krill prey can sometimes win in a fight.

  9. Animals

    Got an environmental problem? Beavers could be the solution

    A new book shows how important beavers have been in the past — and how they could improve the landscape of the future.

  10. Ecosystems

    Madagascar’s predators are probably vulnerable to toxic toads

    The Asian common toad, an invasive species in Madagascar, produces a toxin in its skin that’s probably toxic to most of the island’s predators.

  11. Animals

    How a deep-sea geology trip led researchers to a doomed octopus nursery

    A healthy population of cephalopods could be hiding nearby, though, a new study contends.

  12. Animals

    How a social lifestyle helped drive a river otter species to near extinction

    A reconstruction of 20th-century hunting practices reveals why one species of Amazon river otters nearly went extinct while another persisted.