science reporting

embargoes

Confused thoughts on embargoes

Seventy! That’s how many observatories around the world turned their antennae to study the neutron-star collision that LIGO first detected. So I don’t know why the LIGO Collaboration, and Nature, bothered to embargo the announcement and, more importantly, the scientific papers of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration as well as

The Green Bank radio telescope, West Virginia. Credit: NRAO/AUI, CC BY 3.0

Breakthrough Listen

Auditing science stories: Two examples from the bottom rungs

There are different kinds of science stories. I don’t just mean the usual long-form, short-form stuff. I mean there are qualitatively different kinds of stories. They inhabit a hierarchy, and right at the bottom is getting something wrong. Like the way Livemint did on April 20, 2017, reporting that