Journalists Putting the Beauty Back in Science

         As we grow up, many topics that once seemed mysterious, majestic and magical, such as dinosaurs, spaceships, earthquakes and volcanoes are taught in an increasingly more technical fashion.  The intricate assembly of math, physics and chemistry knowledge that is used to understand these once-unexplainable becomes a boring blather of relationships between values on a piece of paper.

         In middle school, at least from my own experience, there was a large shift in the style of teaching and learning from a more theoretical and light approach, to a more intensive, memorization approach.  This was especially apparent in science classes where you had to memorize various values and equations that are invaluable for further scientific exploration, but are truly a bore to learn.  It is due to this change that many students who love the large, relevant scientific concepts and ideas lose interest in pursuing science.  It is almost as if middle school science classes are the first string of “weed-out” classes for scientifically oriented students. 

         Scientific journalists are at a rare advantage when publishing scientific news articles.  They have the ability to over arch all of the raw scientific data to make inferences from the data and to relay those concepts to the public in an understandable and entertaining way.  News articles that involve titles such as “Asteroid Mining”, “Ancient Dinosaur Bones Uncovered”, and “Coral-Killing Starfish…” are examples of how the beauty and mystery of science can once again be relayed to the fraction of the public who are not scientifically oriented.