BYBS: Science News

Science News is a weekly publication about (wait for it) news in the scientific community! I'm a fan of this sort of thing because it's usually good news. So much of the news I hear is about very bad things: how people are being killed in places like Iraq or Darfur, how the US leads the developed world in infant mortality, our elected officials have approved yet another abomination, etc. News about a scientific development, even when it's about something like global warming, demonstrates that we're smart, that we can work together, how there's hope.

I like Science News in particular because it's short, timely and approachable. Unlike Scientific American, the thing is about 15 pages long. If we're only counting article pages, then it's down to 8 to 10 page. If you read every single page in an issue it would probably take 2 hours, tops. If you're like me, and just read the stuff that sounds interesting, it takes less than an hour.

Science News is also about recent developments. Its articles are about stuff that's happening now, as opposed to things that happened a year ago. The articles are written for a general audience. Everyone's work is gibberish to most other people, so the writers make no assumptions about the reader.

The icing on the cake is that, as a not for profit, many of the articles are available for free on the web. www.sciencenews.org is where you can take a look if you are interested.

I tells ya, life doesn't get much better than this :-)

Notes:

• The above image is © 2008 by Science News (www.sciencenews.org). It is the cover for the February 16th issue.