Plumbing the Archives
A meditation on 90 years of Science News
By Janet Raloff
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 scientist where I could learn more about wormholes, black holes and event horizons. “You won’t understand the journal articles,” 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.
The following 12 pages offer highlights of my trek through the evolution of Science News — and the history of science as it emerged, week by week. But this compilation doesn’t even hint at the depth and breadth of our reporting. I’ve always argued that what distinguishes Science News is how amazingly catholic its coverage is, by which I mean comprehensive — reporting on physics and chemistry and what’s now known as materials science every bit as intensively as health, zoology, genetics and anthropology.