Science Reporting for the Educated Layperson?

[mikeylikey]

Take this story for example.

Mainstream news reporting tends to go like this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecarte ... cc1bb631fa

Breathless proclamations such as "Scientists capture Supernova explosion live on camera - watch video here" and then the video is actually a CGI artist rendering and the story gives basically no science.


On the other hand, the source literature is pretty much incomprehensible to a non-practitioner:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3 ... 357/ac3f3a

Pre-explosion imaging of SN 2020tlf was also acquired by the ZTF (Bellm et al. 2019; Graham et al. 2019) and ATLAS (Tonry et al. 2018b). ZTF g/r-band photometry was obtained through the ZTF forced-photometry service (Masci et al. 2019) and covers a phase range of δ t = −900.4 to −34.5 days before first light. We follow the procedure outlined in the ZTF forced-photometry manual to apply a signal-to-noise threshold (SNT) of 3 to the data, i.e., all photometry with signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) > 3 are considered >3σ detections. After the SNT is applied, we find evidence for tentative pre-explosion ZTF r-band flux (m ≈ 21.2 mag) ranging from δ t = −128.4 to −51.50 days since first light.

So you've got somebody like me, who is interested in this story, but can't find anything in between the 3rd-grade-level (that's being generous) explanation presented in the mainstream reports vs. concentrated industrial grade jargon in the Actual Literature.

Does anything in between exist?

[Allentown]

Wired used to be pretty good. But I haven't been there in ~5 years.

[mgil]

Nature seems to be readable yet a respectable journal. You can probably find a Russian mirror site to see the articles for free.

[Hanley]

Take this story for example.

Mainstream news reporting tends to go like this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecarte ... cc1bb631fa

Breathless proclamations such as "Scientists capture Supernova explosion live on camera - watch video here" and then the video is actually a CGI artist rendering and the story gives basically no science.


On the other hand, the source literature is pretty much incomprehensible to a non-practitioner:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3 ... 357/ac3f3a

Pre-explosion imaging of SN 2020tlf was also acquired by the ZTF (Bellm et al. 2019; Graham et al. 2019) and ATLAS (Tonry et al. 2018b). ZTF g/r-band photometry was obtained through the ZTF forced-photometry service (Masci et al. 2019) and covers a phase range of δ t = −900.4 to −34.5 days before first light. We follow the procedure outlined in the ZTF forced-photometry manual to apply a signal-to-noise threshold (SNT) of 3 to the data, i.e., all photometry with signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) > 3 are considered >3σ detections. After the SNT is applied, we find evidence for tentative pre-explosion ZTF r-band flux (m ≈ 21.2 mag) ranging from δ t = −128.4 to −51.50 days since first light.

So you've got somebody like me, who is interested in this story, but can't find anything in between the 3rd-grade-level (that's being generous) explanation presented in the mainstream reports vs. concentrated industrial grade jargon in the Actual Literature.

Does anything in between exist?

Quanta Magazine is fantastic.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/

[olekto]

I like Ars Technica, they usually cover the large stories, but maybe not everything:
https://arstechnica.com/

[hector]

If you're a boring enough person you might enjoy getting the intro-level college text book for the field.
I've done this twice and not regretted it.

This won't get you near expert level. But youll probably be better versed to start to read the technical articles.

[ccoyle]

https://sciencebulletin.org/

https://www.statnews.com/

https://www.newscientist.com/

[JonA]

No suggestions, other than I thought Anathem by Neal Stephenson was a good book on the subject.

[omaniphil]

Take this story for example.

Mainstream news reporting tends to go like this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecarte ... cc1bb631fa

Breathless proclamations such as "Scientists capture Supernova explosion live on camera - watch video here" and then the video is actually a CGI artist rendering and the story gives basically no science.


On the other hand, the source literature is pretty much incomprehensible to a non-practitioner:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3 ... 357/ac3f3a

Pre-explosion imaging of SN 2020tlf was also acquired by the ZTF (Bellm et al. 2019; Graham et al. 2019) and ATLAS (Tonry et al. 2018b). ZTF g/r-band photometry was obtained through the ZTF forced-photometry service (Masci et al. 2019) and covers a phase range of δ t = −900.4 to −34.5 days before first light. We follow the procedure outlined in the ZTF forced-photometry manual to apply a signal-to-noise threshold (SNT) of 3 to the data, i.e., all photometry with signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) > 3 are considered >3σ detections. After the SNT is applied, we find evidence for tentative pre-explosion ZTF r-band flux (m ≈ 21.2 mag) ranging from δ t = −128.4 to −51.50 days since first light.

So you've got somebody like me, who is interested in this story, but can't find anything in between the 3rd-grade-level (that's being generous) explanation presented in the mainstream reports vs. concentrated industrial grade jargon in the Actual Literature.

Does anything in between exist?

Not really reporting per se as it's commentary, but Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline blog hosted at Science is really excellent. It's focus is on drug discovery and Pharma, but he covers a lot of biology and chemistry related topics as well. He covered a lot of immunology and virology topics in thr last couple of years for obvious reasons.

https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline

[Hanley]

Who among the non-mathematicians wants to jump in this rabbit hole with me?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathemat ... linkin.bio

[plaguewielder]

There’s a great 3blue1brown video on youtube on this topic.