
Sarah Zielinski
Managing Editor, Science News for Students
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 for Students. Her work has also appeared in Slate, Science, Scientific American, Discover 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 for Students. In 2005, she was a Marine Biological Laboratory Science Journalism Fellow.

All Stories by Sarah Zielinski
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Plants
Pollinators are usually safe from a Venus flytrap
A first-ever look at what pollinates the carnivorous Venus flytrap finds little overlap between pollinators and prey.
- Animals
Tiny trackers reveal the secret lives of young sea turtles
Young loggerhead turtles can end up in very different places in the Atlantic depending on when they hatch.