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. Earth

    Diesels: NO rises with altitude

    The combustion chemistry of heavy-duty diesel trucks changes with altitude.

  2. Earth

    Passive smoking’s carcinogenic traces

    Researchers isolated markers of a cigarette-generated carcinogen in urine of nonsmoking women married to smokers.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Soy slashes cancer-fostering hormones (with recipe)

    Asian women tend to have much lower breast-cancer rates than their Western counterparts–unless they move to Europe or North America. Then the cancers incidence in these women begins to match local norms. United Soybean Board This observation has suggested that something about the Western way of life, probably diet, promotes cancer–or that something about Eastern […]

  4. Humans

    Where’s the Book?

    Innovative curricula are moving science education away from a reliance on textbooks.

  5. Humans

    Errant Texts

    New studies lambaste popular middle-school science texts for being uninspiring, superficial, and error-ridden.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Berry promising anticancer prospects

    Twelve years ago, scientists uncovered a mechanism to explain why the folk remedy of eating cranberries fights urinary tract infections. It now appears that the medicinal powers of the pucker-inducing berries might extend to breast cancer as well. Cranberry Marketing Committee For years, Najla Guthrie and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario in […]

  7. Humans

    I do solemnly swear. . .

    An international science organization is surveying codes of ethics from around the world as a first step towards considering whether scientists globally need an analog of the Hippocratic Oath.

  8. Humans

    High court gives EPA a partial victory

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency can implement tougher controls on tiny airborne particulates that can get deep inside people's lungs.

  9. Health & Medicine

    Stress-prone? Altering the diet may help

    Some people undertake seemingly impossible tasks without frustration, while others become anxious or depressed. A Dutch study now finds that the latter individuals might cope with pressure better if they tailored their diet to fuel the brain with more tryptophan. The brain uses this essential amino acid, a building block of many proteins, to fashion […]

  10. Health & Medicine

    The Good Trans Fat

    One arcane family of fats may be tapped to treat or prevent a host of diseases.

  11. Ecosystems

    Fish Epidemic Traces to Novel Germ

    A new mycobacterium, related to the one causing tuberculosis, is responsible for a mysterious epidemic sickening some of the Chesapeake Bay's most prized fish.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Fighting cancer from the cabbage patch

    Sauerkraut a health food? Not yet. But midwestern scientists have found evidence that something in this pickled cabbage and related foods blocks the action of estrogen, a hormone that can fuel the growth of breast cancer and other reproductive-tract malignancies. Nutritionist William G. Helferich of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues were […]