How Do You Keep Up With Science Developments?

malraid writes "As a nerd who used to love science back in high school (specially physics), I now find myself completely disconnected from any and all scientific developments and news. How do you try to stay up to date with scientific developments? Science journals? Whatever makes it into Slashdot's front page? Books? Magazines? I'm looking for something engaging and informative, for not something that will require me to go and get a PhD just to be able to comprehend."

Comments

Science News magazine

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

sciencenews.org

Slim weekly, decent reporters.

Re:Science News magazine

[frovingslosh]

Absolutely. Read it before it hits Slashdot (sometimes days before) at that site. The paper mag is well worth the cost also if you don't like trees.

new scientist

[thephydes]

is amongst the most accessible (easiest to understand) general coverage science magazines. Scientific American is amongst the least accessible of this type imo. The zinio http://zinio.com/ subscription to New Scientist is less than half the shelf price, and can be read on your computer or an ipad (don't know about other e-readers)

Re:Journals, websites....

[tick-tock-atona]

Sciencedaily is good, but the sheer volume of content is very difficult to keep up with.

I personally like arstechnica's science coverage. Their articles are *always* well researched and written and usually very interesting. http://arstechnica.com/science/

Science podcasts

[emurphy42]

• This Week in Science
• The Future and You
• Changesurfer Radio

TED has already been mentioned. There are some others out there, I'm sure.

I read "Science"

[hey hey hey]

I subscribe to the journal Science. While I admit the actual research articles might as well be written in Linear B, the news articles, and the in-depth sections in front are written assuming the reader is intelligent and educated, but just not an expert in the particular field. It is such a joy to read articles that aren't aimed at the lowest common denominator!

I'm sure Nature, or other similar quality journals, would work as well (I choose Science, mostly because I found a subscription card for them).

MIT Technology Review and The Economist

[jmcbain]

As a CS PhD myself, I also feel the need to keep up with the general sciences. My favourite sources of science news are two magazines: MIT Technology Review and the technology section of The Economist. Both are extremely well-written and distill recent cutting-edge science down into laymen's terms. Both have great websites and great iPad applications. The Economist additionally has a Technology Quarterly issue once every 3 months (duh) that should definitely not be missed.

For Computer Science-related technology articles from research labs and academia that's written for laymen, IEEE Computer Society's Computer magazine and the ACM's Communications of the ACM are great.

If you want something a bit more dumbified, then Wired magazine is very good. I've been subscribing for over 10 years and just recently switched over to an iPad subscription.

Stick all these in your RSS

[Sarusa]

This is the best website for science news for reasonably educated but not specialized people: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Science News has a website - http://www.sciencenews.org/ and a weekly magazine which are always good, if overly sober, though the magazine doesn't have near enough content to cover everything that happened that week.

New Scientist is a weekly mag that has drifted towards Omni or PopSci lately ('IS SENSATIONAL THING TRUE? (...no)'), but will still keep you up to date on most happenings including things you might miss online. http://www.newscientist.com/

Scientific American is a monthly mag that's a bit too political but has some good articles: http://www.scientificamerican.com/

Then there's Discover Magazine, which is a step down from either but has some good blogs: http://discovermagazine.com/

Live Science is a further step down, a good site for training wheel science: http://www.livescience.com/

I won't recommend the mag Science, because even though it's The Magazine, it's not suited for the dabbler.

My balanced suggestion is add the news feeds for all of these to your RSS reader (like Google Reader), click on what looks interesting, and subscribe to New Scientist in print or on Zinio and read it every week.

Quirks & Quarks

[psychonaut]

For the last thirty years I've been getting my weekly dose of science news from Quirks & Quarks on CBC radio. Shows are available for download or streaming online as soon as they air, and their online archive of episodes goes back to 2000.

Re:As an American

[DrBoumBoum]

I think you got wooshed.

ScienceNews

[cyberfringe]

I've been getting the print version of ScienceNews (bi-weekly) for 40 years. The online version http://www.sciencenews.org/ is just as good. There are many other good sites out there of course. This is one I can vouch for as a scientist without hesitation.

Re:Aggregation

[beckerist]

I've thrown all the feeds from each of these sites into Google Reader. In no particular order:

wired.com
slashdot.org
spectrum.ieee.org
scientistscanvas.com
arxiv.org
techcrunch.com
techdirt.com
news.discovery.com
physicsworld.com
newscientist.com
physorg.com
nationalgeographic.com
scienceblog.com

I have plenty more. Any RSS feeder app works. You get some repeats but there's a constant stream of science news.

Some Specific Places on the Internet

[ideonexus]

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing