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. Humans

    Obesity compromises ability to fend off H1N1 flu

    Think you’ll easily survive a bout of H1N1 swine flu? Fat chance – if you’re really fat. New research points to a likely explanation for this weighty vulnerability: a failure of the immune system to rev up as strongly as it should.

  2. Tech

    Fishy fat from soy is headed for U.S. dinner tables

    Most people have heard about omega-3 fatty acids, the primary constituents of fish oil. Stearidonic acid, one of those omega-3s, is hardly a household term. But it should become one, researchers argued this week at the 2011 Experimental Biology meeting.

  3. Humans

    Federal shutdown would muzzle federal science

    Even a brief shutdown would have on the dissemination of data. Scientific data, for instance. Such as new findings from research studies with public health implications.

  4. Earth

    Arctic Ocean hosts weird freshwater pond

    Odd, persistent winds prevent river inputs from mixing with the sea.

  5. Humans

    Record ‘Arctic’ ozone minimum expands beyond Arctic

    In mid-March, our online story about the thinning of stratospheric ozone over the Arctic noted that conditions appeared primed for regional ozone losses to post an all-time record. On April 5, World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Michel Jarraud announced that Arctic ozone had indeed suffered an unprecedented thinning. And these air masses are on the move to mid-latitudes.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Obesity messes with the brain

    Excess weight may compromise memory and concentration, possibly by spurring inflammation that damages white matter.

  7. Big Fishing Yields Small Fish

    Researchers map predator loss and predict unstable oceans.

  8. Humans

    Pre-chewed baby food common in HIV-positive households, study suggests

    Here’s a particularly disturbing stat: 31 percent of babies in households where the mom is HIV-positive get at least some pre-chewed food. In most cases the surveyed caregivers who reported doing that pre-chewing were the infected moms.

  9. Tech

    U.S. network detects Fukushima plume

    Traces of radioactivity attributable to the earthquake-damaged Fukushima reactor complex in Japan have reached the West Coast of the United States.

  10. Tech

    Chernobyl’s lessons for Japan

    Radioactive iodine released by the Chernobyl nuclear accident has left a legacy of thyroid cancers among downwinders — one that shows no sign of diminishing. The new data also point to what could be in store if conditions at Japan’s troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power complex continue to sour.

  11. Tech

    Radiation: Japan’s third crisis

    As if the magnitude-9 earthquake on March 11 and killer tsunami weren’t enough, a new round of aftershocks — psychological ones over fear of radiation — are rocking Japan and its neighbors.

  12. Humans

    Record ozone thinning looms in Arctic

    Depletion could expose the northern midlatitudes to higher-than-normal ultraviolet radiation in coming weeks.