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. Tech

    Large Hadron Collider suffers carb attack

    Efforts to get the Large Hadron Collider up and running just encountered a temporary snag, according to yesterday's online edition of The Times of London. A crusty chunk of bread “paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.”

  2. Earth

    Nanoparticles’ indirect threat to DNA

    Tiny metal nanoparticles can damage DNA, essentially by triggering toxic gossip.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Genome 10K: A new ark

    Featured blog: Researchers are working to catalog the DNA sequences of just about every vertebrate genus.

  4. Climate

    Kyoto climate treaty’s greenhouse ‘success’

    There are 33 days until the opening of formal negotiations in Copenhagen on the next global climate-protection treaty. The hoped-for accord would take up where the current treaty leaves off. But to get some perspective on just where that is, a new United Nations report describes for negotiators and the public just how much the Kyoto Protocol has achieved. And real strides have been made in slowing the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions, thanks to many European nations (albeit with little help from North American ones or Japan).

  5. Humans

    H1N1 vaccine: Counting side effects

    Pregnant women are considered at high risk for suffering complications or death from the new H1N1 pandemic swine flu. So they’re near the top of the list for getting vaccinated. A new international study calculates that up to 400 out of every million pregnant women who receive such swine-flu shots will experience a miscarriage within 24 hours. But not BECAUSE of their flu shots.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Mice: seasonal flu vaccine and vulnerability to pandemic strain

    Earlier this year, Dutch scientists showed that vaccinating mice against seasonal strains of flu rendered the animals unnecessarily vulnerable to dying if they later encountered a pandemic flu strain. Authors of this study now ask whether there are lessons in their data for parents. Such as whether to ignore recommendations that youngsters get seasonal-flu shots during years when pandemic flu is raging. Others suggest this idea, at least as regards people, is bunk.

  7. Science & Society

    College trend: Cut-rate faculty

    Among U.S. colleges and universities, tenure-track positions decreasingly represent the norm. “Adjuncts who teach part time are now about half of the professoriate,” according to a series of articles in the Oct. 23 Chronicle of Higher Education. Non-tenure-track faculty may be offered full-time slots and benefits, but with embarrassing paychecks.

  8. Climate

    Winter forecast: Sustained blizzard of climate news

    At least in our area of the country, consumers are already being assaulted — well before Halloween — with Christmas music, decorations and holiday-themed goods. Reporters are smack in the throes of their own early seasonal blitz: News items carrying a climate or global-warming theme. And I don’t expect the crush of climate news and seminars to diminish until around Christmas. That’s when the next United Nations COP — or Conference of the Parties — will end this year’s pivotal round of negotiations in Copenhagen aimed at producing a new climate treaty.

  9. Agriculture

    Report tallies hidden energy costs

    The average retail cost of U.S. coal-fired electricity was 9 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available). But there are health and environmental costs of that power that consumers don’t pay, at least as part of their electric bill. According to a new report, accounting for those costs would double the true cost of shooting some electrons through the nation's power grid.

  10. Agriculture

    Update: U.S. swine infected with swine flu

    Well, it's official. Over the weekend, Agriculture Department scientists found evidence that at least one pig exhibited at this year's Minnesota state fair was infected with the pandemic H1N1 strain of swine flu.

  11. Agriculture

    Of swine flu, pigs and a state fair

    To date, federal monitoring has yet to turn up any U.S. pigs infected with the killer swine flu strain known as H1N1. But Agriculture Department Secretary Tom Vilsack announced yesterday that his agency’s veterinary labs would be reexamining whether any of the apparently healthy pigs exhibited last August 16 to Sept. 1 at the Minnesota state fair might have been infected with the virus. Why? “An outbreak of 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza occurred in a group of children housed in a dormitory at the fair at the same time samples were collected from the pigs,” USDA notes

  12. Climate

    Carbon emissions: Trend improves, but …

    Sometimes what’s bad for the economy can be good for the planet. Or so argued Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, yesterday. This environmental trend spotter pointed to several developments that may have escaped our attention as the global economy alternately sputtered and entered periods of freefall throughout the past 18 months. Trend one: U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, have taken a tumble.