Head’s Up: New Scope up…
Scope is the MIT Grad Program in Science Writing’s student webzine. The new issue is up — in fact this is its inaugural web-distributed edition.
Check it out — and please note that while the good stuff within is the product of hard work by the program’s students, the existence of a Web-based Scope is due to both the hard work and the excellence of the career put together by Marcia Bartusiak, one of the professors in the Program. She serves as Scope’s editor (assisted by the Grad Program’s Shannon Larkin) — that’s the current labor part of the deal — and she won the Germant Prize from the American Institute of Physics for 2007. That is, the AIP correctly sees the work that Marcia has done over her career as “the accomplishments of a person who has made significant contributions to cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimension of physics.”
The sweet thing about that prize is that it comes with both a cash award for the winner and an additional pool of money to be used to further the public communication of science at the winner’s discretion. Marcia devoted that money to making this version of Scope possible. And thus the world gets a new venue in which to put science into the mediastream.
You can take this all as a bit of puffery, given that I, like Marcia, do most of my MIT work within the Science Writing program. But still: more science out there is what we classically call A Good Thing, and it should be celebrated whenever we move that boulder of public understanding forward.
Image: Lord Rosse’s 72 inch “Leviathan” telescope, Birr Castle, 1860. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Tags: MIT, science writing, students
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