Journal Links and Writing Science Articles

[Buster's Uncle]

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.083401

I'd guess ideas for popular/mainstream science articles come from, in descending order:
 1.) People in the business reading articles on other venues
  2.) Researchers and/or related organizations send out a press release
   3.) Somebody actually reads professional journals

Options 1 & 2 are obviously lower-difficulty settings, most especially according to how much the scientific field coincides with the science writer's education/training/expertise - of course.  Lori, I'd say the challenge for you is to work at terseness and accessibility without sacrificing accuracy - or to put it more bluntly, your science writing tends to rigor to the point of being dry.  All the jokes and conversational English and pop culture references the traffic will bear.  -But do spare us the Tattoine references every time an exoplanet is discovered in a binary system; everybody does that, and it was old/tired/lame/stupid the second time.

I reckon places that hire science writers like credentials in particular fields, but that should descend wildly in importance as you go from a specialty shop like Space.com to a wide/no-focus venues like Newsweek - so it would be good as a training exercise to have a go at things like archaeology and whatever way outside your wheelhouse.

-Interesting note; wire service science articles are invariably dry as dust, lacking in fine or even moderate detail, but very, very concise.  Live Science and Space.com vary as to length and "pop-ness", almost always pretty solid and rarely leaving you thinking crucial detail was left out, but are prone to embarrassingly moronic headlines (editors write those).  Places like Business Insider and Newsweek are actually similar in style, with more sober headlines.

You know, you're not going to want to shoot to please Uno, exactly, on the aerospace stuff, but me.  In general, though, the crowd here is probably aiming a little high.  There's an optimal balance to be found, where babytalk science is only gonna get you gigs with children's educational venues -not to be ruled out, if you turn out to be able to explain science to kids- and strict rigor, which is unlikely to get you any gigs...

Have a go, somewhat more often than you actually feel like doing.  I certainly don't expect you to take a tilt at everything, at least initially, certainly not in under 24 hours - though both would be good practice for pro work.  I apologize in advance for variably being in the mood to provide good feedback, and for probably ripping good/hard work to shreds in the interest of making it mainstream and accessible.


I strongly urge everyone to chip in with questions and suggestions and whatever when Lori submits something - it's all about writing for an audience, and constructive criticism lets a young man know his friends give a darn, too.

[Buster's Uncle]

https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.01120

Is it cheating if I read the SciTech Daily article first?

Only if you still write it up.

Honest.

(We've both let this slide lately [I wasn't entirely kidding about a short Horkheimer version], and really ought to dedicate a thread, since you need to write up science outside your expertise if that's a thing you fancy trying to make money at...  You're quite smart, even by the standards of this community, and clearly well-read; I think you could swing the archaeology papers, notwithstanding the difference in jargon and rigor.)

I've changed my mind.  It's nothing but clear that pro science writers read each other's stuff all the time.  Have a look at that SciTech Daily article and party on with your own bad self.

So I didn't read that article specifically, but I have been following this story. Nevertheless, here's my take:

In the 1920s, Hubble famously discovered the expansion of the universe by looking at Cepheid variables in other galaxies. Cepheid variables are standard candles, which is what astronomers use to measure cosmic distances. Because a star that looks bright might be a close, dim star or a distant, luminous star, we need a way to independently determine how bright a star should be in order to figure out how far away it is. Cepheid variables serve as a standard candle because their brightness periodically pulsates and there is a correlation between the pulsation period and its average peak brightness. So the longer the period, the brighter a Cepheid should be, which means that if you find a dim, long period Cepheid, you know it must be very far away.

The tricky part is that in order to calibrate "very far away," you have to know the actual distances to some nearby Cepheids by some other method. This is the cosmic distance ladder, by which we climb one distance-measuring rung to reach the next. For the closest interstellar objects, we measure distance by "parallax," which in practice is a kind of vague term that corresponds to any method that uses a combination of time and geometry. The distances to the Cepheids Hubble used were actually determined via "statistical parallax," which is a little complicated and not central to this story. (See this post if you want to get a better idea. Although I'm not super happy about how that one turned out.)

When you hear the term parallax, what probably springs to mind is what astronomers refer to as "stellar parallax," which is observing the apparent shift of a foreground star against background stars as the Earth moves around its orbit. Measure the position of a star. Wait half a year. Measure again. The greater the difference between the star's two apparent positions, the closer it is. This paper details a very precise set of stellar parallax observations made using the Hubble telescope. I'll talk about why these measurements are so good in a bit, but we're not quite done with Hubble the dude.

Hubble's discovery required accurate distance measurements and accurate spectroscopy. The faster a star is receding from you, the redder its spectrum will be due to the Doppler shift (redshift for astronomy). What Hubble found was a roughly linear relationship between distance and recession speed. A galaxy twice as far away as another will be receding at twice the speed. Combine this with some fancy math from general relativity and you can conclude that the universe is expanding and must have been smaller in the past. The expansion rate is now referred to as Hubble's constant. However, due to some systematic errors present at the time (for example, there were Cepheids that behaved differently from the rest, but no one knew it then), Hubble's estimate was an order of magnitude too high.

In the decades that followed, astronomers were able to get a much more accurate value for Hubble's constant and were also able to extend it out across the entire cosmos. They achieved this by finding more standard candles, the most important of which is type 1a supernovae. These work as standard candles out to much greater distances than Cepheids because they are extremely luminous and they have a fairly well understood peak luminosity based on underlying physics. Using these supernovae, astronomers were able to show that Hubble's constant is in fact pretty constant over long stretches of time and space. Cool.

So there are two reasons why the most recent Hubble observations are able to pin down a value for Hubble's constant with even less uncertainty. The first has to do with consistency. They measured the parallax of Milky Way Cepheid variables using the same Hubble camera that's been used to measure the brightness of extragalactic Cepheids. This means they can be very confident that discrepancies aren't just due to using different instruments.

Second, they're also using a relatively new technique for taking pictures with Hubble called spatial scanning photometry. Rather than just staring at a star and collecting its light over a period of time, they get Hubble to scan diagonally over it, leaving a star trail on the CCD and then adding up all the light from the trail. The advantage of this method is that you can collect a lot of light from a single source without saturating your pixels and you're not relying on one group of pixels to calculate the brightness of the star. You can average out the brightness across this diagonal pixel slash in a way that reduces the chance for error due to (essentially) imperfect calibration.

So the team got very precise measurements of the brightness and parallax of Milky Way Cepheid variables, which let them recalibrate the cosmic distance ladder all the way out to type 1a supernovae and come up with an even better measurement of Hubble's constant. Great. The reason this story is making headlines, however, is that it widens and solidifies the gap growing between this method of determining Hubble's constant and another method.

Let's flash back to Hubble the dude for a moment. He discovers the expansion of the universe, and theorists run with this idea and postulate a big bang. A big bang should leave behind observational evidence in the form of the cosmic microwave background, which formed when the universe cooled down enough so that electrons could calmly orbit protons and photons could stream outward without fear of hitting those electrons. Some of the static on your TV that nobody sees anymore because we've all gone digital is a result of CMB photons reuniting with matter for the first time in like 13.7 billion years, having cooled down to 2.7 kelvins.

But with very good satellites and other radio/microwave telescopes, we can detect much more than static in the CMB. There are tiny temperature fluctuations, some of them on large scales, others on small scales. You can plot all these variations as a power spectrum, which measures how strong your fluctuations are at particular sizes. The exact shape of this spectrum depends on a variety of factors, but cosmologists can model what it should look like using relatively simple physics.

One of the primary parameters influencing the CMB power spectrum is the ratio of matter and energy when the CMB formed. Before the CMB, matter and photons bounced around in a big sloshy mix that caused reverberations throughout the cosmos. Once the CMB formed, they separated and stopped influencing each other. The result is that the CMB power spectrum encodes the matter and energy waves that were most prominent at that last moment of scattering, so the ratio of matter to energy tells you what kind of waves you should get.

The big bang says the universe started out with more energy (from photons and neutrinos) than regular matter. However, as the universe expands, energy dilutes more quickly than matter (due to redshift), which means that at some point, matter becomes more dominant than energy. The ratio of matter to energy that you get from the CMB tells you when this happens, which tells you how quickly the universe is expanding, which gets you another estimate of Hubble's constant. (The difficult part is that many factors go into the CMB power spectrum, so this really gives you a range of acceptable values for the Hubble constant as those other parameters slide around.)

And the problem is that as more accurate maps of the CMB have been drawn (from WMAP and Planck), the value of Hubble's constant they're getting and the value coming from type 1a supernovae have stopped overlapping. The CMB gets you 67 km/s/Mpc, and this new paper's recalibration of Cepheid variables gets you 73 km/s/Mpc, and the uncertainties have shrunk enough that you can't just hope they're really the same value. So there's something important that cosmologists are missing. Thanks to efforts like this most recent paper, measurement error is probably not the answer. Maybe new physics? Maybe assumptions underlying one or both methods are wrong? No one is really sure yet. It's a pickle.

Wow that was way too long. I'll see if I can put together a shorter version later.

Your language is good, but I'm going to need to teach you some news/journalism style.  You want to begin with a "lede", which is one sentence, concise as humanly possible without being misleadingly simple, with a summary of, and/or hook for, the article's idea(s).

Skimming the beginning, you need to say "astronomer Edwin Hubble" to avoid confusion with his eponymous space telescope.  At the mention of six months later for parallax. you probably ought to work in as briefly as possible that it's opposite side of orbit = greatest distance baseline.

I mean, in general, you want to cut where feasible, simplifying, but also idiot-proofing.

I'll try hard to give you an in-depth reading and a lot more feedback later today when I'm caught up on my daily routine.

Protip:  Always come up with a headline or two - not just for presentation here, but because even good editors sometimes come up with a head that misses the point and/or is a lame joke and/or chaps your butt some other way; it is standard practice to end you copy with some suggested headlines, which they may actually use instead of inventing something embarrassing.  Here, you'll want to bold your favorite at the top - but just as well get in the habit of putting any other head ideas at the bottom.

I should quote the journal link and these two posts to the dedicated thread, so we can go on from there there, shouldn't I?

[Lorizael]

Yeah, I don't bury the lede so much as dismember it and scatter the parts. In my academic writing, I eventually got trained to produce reasonable thesis sentences and introductory paragraphs, but it took awhile. When I'm writing more conversationally, I tend toward a storytelling style where I kind of eventually wend my way to a point. I know that's something I need to work on.

[Buster's Uncle]

...It strikes me that at some early point, if we can get in relatively energetic/productive moods at the same time -I know, but it's possible- it would be the thing to do to have you write up something many times over in different format/styles according to venue/intended audience.  -Writing for your blog in different than for any journalistic outlet, UPI wants something different than Newsweek wants something different than ABC wants something different than Nickelodeon.  Geo can point out the constellations by name with infectious enthusiasm and I know the Big Dipper and the Pleiades and that's about it, and while you'd write about the same for him and me outside skywatching/constellation stuff, you'd write -or really should- differently for 10 year-olds, and similarly but not the same for my very bright Aunt in her 80s who got her GED in her 70s and has no interest in astronomy to my knowledge, but might enjoy a nice brief piece about Jupiter's Red Spot written in plain English (and would probably surprise you with how much she knows about bible-related archeology).

For that matter, a literal Horkheimer version would be wildly different than what I really meant to ask for, broadcast style being all about simplicity and inflexible exact length and always a lot more obsessed with entertainment value, and not needing, for example, the rigid rules for quote formatting.  I think we ought to concentrate on print style -I assume you have some notion of working at home via email w/o direct human contact- at least for now, though my degree is actually in broadcasting, so if you wanted to keep open the possibility of doing something for local radio stations or something --- this is a much more awkward format for that than print, but we can take a run at it later if you want.

The point being, the more versatility you learn, the better chance of a lucrative hermit gig.

---

[ninja'd]  I'd already been thinking I needed to talk about journalistic Descending Pyramid style.  You can't do a UPI wire story at all without it, but don't need it at all for a long piece for National Geographic - between those, it varies, but you must be able to write somewhat that way for most print/web venues with any roots at all in actual journalism.

[Buster's Uncle]

Lessee; just thinking about areas where other members might should especially be useful chipping in... Rusty is a widely-read history enthusiast w/o any particular training, and GodKing/Spacy is an engineer -I don't recall of what- by education and long professional experience who now teaches (high school?) science and is know to me to be a facile communicator of science...

-I'm running incredibly later than usual on my routine this evening, and might not get to your feedback -at least not everything to my satisfaction- tonight.

[Lorizael]

No problem. At this point I'm probably just going to read and go to sleep, as I'm pretty tired.

[Buster's Uncle]

Okydoke; I still haven't wrapped up daily stuff, and nit-picking and suggestions ought to eat up a lot more than an hour.


A thing to be thinking, meanwhile, is about how you approach a science write-up thematically for a broad audience.  You need to figure out going in what the 'hook' is; what about it is of interest to the great unwashed, both the general public and especially them of us as has no particular science education but read science articles anyway.  What's weird, wild, and/or 'sexy' about it?  Is it the cause of anything laymen know about IRL?  Does it make anything light up or help explain life the universe and everything?  Are there any technology implications/possible advances in anything people have or encounter IRL? 

-Also, get in the habit of keeping an eye peeled for quotes in journal articles in clear English you can use.  (I've tended to ignore links to press releases, but I'll start snagging those when I see them, for at least a source of quotes in English...)

[Lorizael]

Good stuff to think about, yeah. I really appreciate the journalism workshop.

[Unorthodox]

Whats the end goal here? 

I've read to hit the widest audience you need to write to a 5th grade level.  Or are we trying for a little more than that?

[Lorizael]

I want to get paid to write about science. At least in the short to medium term, I'm not picky about how that happens. I can write for newspapers/magazines by pitching, I can write press releases for universities, I can do outreach for scientific organizations and agencies, etc. But as BU pointed out, those all require different audiences.

Personally, there are two-ish ways I'd like to write about science: (1) provide slightly meatier explanations for people who get fed up with bad/lazy science articles but don't want to wade into journal papers (basically me before I went back to school), (2) tell stories about how science gets done, focusing on the process and pitfalls more than on big, flashy, speculative results.

[Buster's Uncle]

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JE005333/abstract
https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/how-moon-formed-inside-vaporized-earth-synestia

[Buster's Uncle]

https://news.osu.edu/news/2018/02/27/research-magic-mushrooms/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/evl3.42

[Buster's Uncle]

I've tutored writing informally, and never taught journalism at all - and those classes are 31-29 years behind me, my brief professional experience almost as far back.  -So I'm sure you'll forgive me while I'm wringing my memory for details and haphazardly working out a course as I go.  I'm having trouble getting motived to do the work, too, which I volunteer not to fish for gratitude, but just why I'm doing a heckuvalot slower turnaround than I would in a high-energy mood phase.  (Actually, this could help me phase into that that if I can discipline myself and feel like I'm doing a pal some good.)

I want to get paid to write about science. At least in the short to medium term, I'm not picky about how that happens. I can write for newspapers/magazines by pitching, I can write press releases for universities, I can do outreach for scientific organizations and agencies, etc. But as BU pointed out, those all require different audiences.

Personally, there are two-ish ways I'd like to write about science: (1) provide slightly meatier explanations for people who get fed up with bad/lazy science articles but don't want to wade into journal papers (basically me before I went back to school), (2) tell stories about how science gets done, focusing on the process and pitfalls more than on big, flashy, speculative results.

The more I know about your goals and general druthers, the better I can be of help, so this is great.

Some observations:  Pitching articles freelance --- it's job-hunting everyday.  It's like working up the courage to chase women.  You're actually better at that than me, 'cause I can't take the failure/rejection and don't do any of those things at all for a couple decades straight, now.  If you've any notion of making a living as a science writer --- it might be more feasible to sacrifice a lot of freedom on those two-ish ways to write science and get a staff job somewhere and put up with getting assignments like 'roughly 1,500 words on how Kylo Ren's lightsaber might work with real science' or 'funny two pages about the rings around Uranus w/o making the obvious jokes' or, possibly better, 'write up this press release'  -but it might be from someone working for Reynolds Tobacco.

Alternately, step your game way up and blog one or two or three tight pieces a week without fail -copywrite notice on everything- with ads - I could help you a lot with SEO and how to promote online, but at best, it would take years to build up to traffic/money worth mentioning without some awesome luck.  -In concord with that, you could set yourself up as a sort self-syndicated newspaper columnist.  I'm dimly aware that some people try to make a go of that kind of thing, but haven't the foggiest how it works, what hellish amount of hustle is required, or if anyone much ever made a living at it for long.  In the same line, compromise and pitch it to an actual syndicate.  I don't know much about that, either, but if you demonstrated you could put together a regular thing the they could sell to papers, you might have as much freedom as the market would bear.

write press releases for universities, I can do outreach for scientific organizations and agencies, etc

When I was a junior reporter, I'd occasionally get handed press releases to rewrite into articles.  I was appalled by how few PR flacks in town knew the basic AP stylebook stuff.  About a decade and half later, I was secretary of the chess club in the same small city/big town -pop. aprox. 30,000- and taking initiative to be the one promoting the club, when we put on a simul, or tournament, or whatever mildly newsworthy/promotable event, I DID know the basic newswriting format, and was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of my emailed press releases run verbatim in papers in town -and somewhat around the region- when they got any traction at all.  I do not know, but imagine that that's a lot less likely along the highly-urbanized mid-Atlantic coast area well south of New York - but I also imagine the standards for professional press-release writing PR flacks are a lot higher, and releases without proper news format get treated with a lot less respect at the news venue end.  I know I didn't respect what I was re-writing where I was.

The good news about that is that the basics are just a few pages worth of info that you can learn fairly easily, being able to write and having a good trained grasp of hard science.


---

I'm sure it would be welcome if others tossed in suggestions about getting or creating paying work along the lines Lori mentioned...

[Buster's Uncle]

So, the descending pyramid newswriting style rule is this lingering anachronism from Victorian times -wire service agencies like Associated Press having roots back that far, and the AP stylebook being the gold standard of newswriting style, (how that actually came about, I never knew)- you begin your story with the very most important fact, then second-most and so on, with no regard whatsoever for good fiction/storytelling/entertainment style of building suspense to a climax and all that Aristotelian stuff.

It's that way because -dig this- a correspondent sending a story long-distance by telegraph needs to get the most important info across first in case Indians cut the line or something, and the paper back home only got the beginning of it...

I kid you not.

---

Like most of the AP Stylebook stuff, how important adherence to the style is depends on the news venue.  Similar to what I said yesterday, the wire services -I'm aware of AP, UPI and AFP being around these days and covering science stories- of course are going to want that to varying degrees of rigidity according to the editor and I don't know what-all, but pretty much that, and National Geographic not at all; they want well-written true story-stories.  Most fall in between, again as I said before, depending on how deep the organizational style roots are in straight traditional journalism - and also what medium.  Naturally, you want to actually have at least a skim of SciWebsiteX before you cold-email with a pitch, especially if article's already written.

...However, it's pretty obvious that a venue that likes entertaining, bouncy writing and don't give a flyin' 'bout the stylebook is a lot more likely to take a sober journalism piece than the other way around, so you DO want to master this stuff even if you end up at Cracked.com...

[Buster's Uncle]

Cracked.com is something to really consider, BTW.  If you think you could do science in a ripped-off-from-Letterman-like-everyone-else list format with either a million pop-culture references and HIlarious jokes worked in -or else otherwise just made fascinating to read- they are like, totally set up to train amateur netheads up to their standards, at which point they do pay.  (That site does have a way of eating your whole day as a reader -and crashing your browser because you opened two many tabs- and Mylochka says it really is crack, which I can't deny.)  You wouldn't actually need to know anything about journalism, writing there, though I would hope it helps if a list is true.