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

    Few Americans eat right

    The Institute of Medicine periodically issues recommendations on what people should eat to be healthy and maintain a reasonable weight. Americans have largely ignored this well-intentioned advice, a new study shows. It reports that “nearly the entire U.S. population consumes a diet that is not on par with recommendations.”

  2. Earth

    Contemplating an Arctic oil spill

    The waters off northern Alaska may be “the largest oil province in the United States” after the Gulf, notes Edward Itta, a native of Barrow, Alaska. He is also mayor of the North Slope Borough, an 88,000-square-mile jurisdiction that runs across the upper part of the state. And in a September 27 videoconference with the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, he tried to impress upon the commissioners just how remote his neck of the tundra is.

  3. Chemistry

    BP oil: Gulf sediment at risk, oceanographer claims

    Most of BP’s spilled oil remains in the Gulf — with little sign of degrading, according to Ian MacDonald of Florida State University. And much of this surviving oil could be in sediment or on its way there, the scientist reported at a September 27 meeting in Washington, D.C.

  4. Tech

    Poor initial Gulf spill numbers did ‘not impact’ response

    In the early weeks after the catastrophic blowout of the deep-water well in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, BP — the well’s owner — provided the government dramatically low estimates of the flow rate of oil and gas into the sea. Did telling Uncle Sam and the public that the flow rate was 1,000 barrels per day and later 5,000 barrels per day — when the actual rate was closer to 50,000 to 65,000 barrels per day — affect the spill’s management?

  5. Earth

    Clean out your medicine cabinet: Today!

    For years, people have been chastised for pitching unused drugs into the trash, turning them into potentially toxic pollutants that can leach into the environment. On Saturday, September 25, the Drug Enforcement Administration is offering to take those drugs off our hands. For free. No questions asked.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Disease donations

    Sometimes organ donors share more than a functioning body part. They can unwittingly bestow quickly lethal infections. That’s what happened, beginning last November, according to a new case report.

  7. Math

    Potato chips: A symptom of the U.S. R&D problem

    Last year, U.S. consumers spent $7.1 billion on potato chips — $2 billion more than the federal government’s total 2009 investment on research and development. There’s something wrong, here, when Americans are more willing to empty their wallets for the junk food that will swell their waistlines than for investments in the engine driving the creation of jobs, economic growth and national security.

  8. Earth

    Gulf spill may have been somewhat bigger than feds, BP estimated

    Researchers estimate the oil output using a new technique developed for measuring the output of marine hydrothermal vents.

  9. Environment

    Gases dominate Gulf’s subsea plumes

    Shipboard experiments in June show that natural gas dominates the Gulf oil plumes and that its components are the favorite choice of microbes.

  10. Health & Medicine

    DNA-damaging disinfection by-products found in pool water

    A study detects subtle changes in swimmers’ cells after 40 minutes of laps.

  11. Dry air might boost flu transmission

    Germs prefer an environment that’s cool, dry and UV-free, experiments suggest.

  12. Ecosystems

    Climate’s link to plague

    Scientists have correlated changes in long-term Pacific Ocean temperature patterns with the incidence of a deadly bacterial pestilence, one spread by fleas living on and around mice and other rodents.