Janet Raloff

Janet Raloff

Editor, Digital, Science News Explores

Editor Janet Raloff has been a part of the Science News Media Group since 1977. While a staff writer at Science News, she covered the environment, toxicology, energy, science policy, agriculture and nutrition. She was among the first to give national visibility to such issues as electromagnetic pulse weaponry and hormone-mimicking pollutants, and was the first anywhere to report on the widespread tainting of streams and groundwater sources with pharmaceuticals. A founding board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, her writing has won awards from groups including the National Association of Science Writers. In July 2007, while still writing for Science News, Janet took over Science News Explores (then known as Science News for Kids) as a part-time responsibility. Over the next six years, she expanded the magazine's depth, breadth and publication cycle. Since 2013, she also oversaw an expansion of its staffing from three part-timers to a full-time staff of four and a freelance staff of some 35 other writers and editors. Before joining Science News, Janet was managing editor of Energy Research Reports (outside Boston), a staff writer at Chemistry (an American Chemical Society magazine) and a writer/editor for Chicago's Adler Planetarium. Initially an astronomy major, she earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University (with an elective major in physics).

All Stories by Janet Raloff

  1. Health & Medicine

    Academic Impacts of Vegetarian Childhoods

    Teens are always looking for creative excuses for late homework, low test scores, and waning attention in class. Any who stumbled onto a copy of the September American Journal of Clinical Nutrition may have uncovered the basis for a particularly novel rationalization: “My parents made me a vegetarian.” Plants do not make vitamin B-12, also […]

  2. Health & Medicine

    Unexpected Sources of Peanut Allergy

    Attention new moms: Some lotions and creams for soothing scaly or irritated skin run the risk of triggering immune reactions in your infant that could lead to a serious food allergy months later. Or so conclude the authors of a new study in England. U.S. products explicitly marketed for use on a baby’s skin, such […]

  3. Humans

    Doctoral seesaw

    Throughout most of the 1990s, the number of doctoral degrees that U.S. universities awarded in science and engineering climbed steadily, to 27,300 in 1998, but by 2001, the number had dropped to 25,500, the lowest number since 1993.

  4. Health & Medicine

    Why beer may deter blood clots

    Downing a beer a day alters the structure of fibrinogen, a blood protein active in clotting.

  5. Health & Medicine

    When Drinking Helps

    Sometimes a nip of alcohol can indeed prove therapeutic, though usually not until middle age.

  6. Chemistry

    A safer antioxidant?

    Scientists have developed a synthetic antioxidant that won't, at high doses, foster the tissue damage the compounds are meant to prevent.

  7. Health & Medicine

    Tipsy Times

    Literally hundreds of studies over the past decade have reported evidence that regular, moderate drinking–downing one to three drinks a day–can offer people significant health benefits by cutting their risks of heart disease and probably diabetes. What such studies usually fail to emphasize is that benefits from a little alcohol show up almost exclusively in […]

  8. Ecosystems

    Ultimate Sea Weed Loose in America

    The unusually invasive strain of seaweed that has been smothering coastal areas of the Mediterranean has shown up in a California lagoon, the first sighting of this ecologically devastating alga in the Americas.

  9. Health & Medicine

    ‘Don’t Drink Alone’ Gets New Meaning

    In what may be bad news for bars and pubs, a European research consortium has found that people drinking alcohol outside of meals have a significantly higher risk of cancer in the mouth and neck than do those taking their libations with food. Luigino Dal Maso of the Cancer Referral Center in Aviano, Italy, and […]

  10. Health & Medicine

    Exonerated? Foods’ acrylamide risks appear low

    A new study downplays the likelihood that people will develop cancer from eating foods naturally tainted with acrylamide, a building block of many plastics and an animal carcinogen.

  11. Health & Medicine

    Stress-prone? Altering the diet may help

    Tailoring a diet to fuel the brain with the precursor of a mood-enhancing chemical may help vulnerable individuals cope with stress.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Diet Tip—Close Your Eyes

    How many times has your resolve to eat prudently been sabotaged by the sight of a buffet table, Mom’s Thanksgiving specialties, or pastries on the dessert cart? Just because a plate is full of food doesn’t mean one has to finish it all. For many of us, new data show, listening to the way our […]