Sarah Zielinski

Sarah Zielinski

Editor, Print at Science News Explores

Sarah Zielinski wanted to be a marine biologist when she was growing up, but after graduating from Cornell University with a B.A. in biology, and a stint at the National Science Foundation, she realized that she didn’t want to spend her life studying just one area of science — she wanted to learn about it all and share that knowledge with the public. In 2004, she received an M.A. in journalism from New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program and began a career in science journalism. She worked as a science writer and editor at the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the American Geophysical Union’s newspaper Eos and Smithsonian magazine before becoming a freelancer. During that time, she started her blog, Wild Things, and moved it to Science News magazine, and then became an editor for and frequent contributor to Science News Explores. Her work has also appeared in Slate, Science, Scientific American, Discover and National Geographic News. She is the winner of the DCSWA 2010 Science News Brief Award and editor of the winner of the Gold Award for Children’s Science News in the 2015 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards, “Where will lightning strike?” published in Science News Explores. In 2005, she was a Marine Biological Laboratory Science Journalism Fellow.

All Stories by Sarah Zielinski

  1. Animals

    Toads prefer to bound, not hop

    The multiple hops made by toads are really a bounding motion similar to movements made by small mammals.

  2. Plants

    Huge, hollow baobab trees are actually multiple fused stems

    The trunk of an African baobab tree can grow to be many meters in diameter but hollow inside. The shape, researchers say, occurs when several stems fuse together.

  3. Climate

    Warming Arctic will let Atlantic and Pacific fish mix

    The ultra-cold, ice-covered Arctic Ocean has kept fish species from the Atlantic and Pacific separate for more than a million years — but global warming is changing that.

  4. Animals

    Ant-eating bears help plants

    A complex web of interactions gives a boost to rabbitbrush plants when black bears consume ants.

  5. Animals

    If pursued by a goshawk, make a sharp turn

    Scientists put a tiny camera on a northern goshawk and watched it hunt. The bird used several strategies to catch prey, failing only when its targets made a sharp turn.

  6. Animals

    Cringe away, guys — this spider bites off his own genitals

    After sex, a male coin spider will chew off his own genitals, an act that might help secure his paternity.

  7. Animals

    Lemurs aren’t pets

    The first survey of lemur ownership in Madagascar finds that thousands of the rare primates are held in households.

  8. Animals

    Paternity test reveals father’s role in mystery shark birth

    A shark pup was born in a tank with three female sharks but no males. A genetic study finds that the shark must have stored sperm for nearly four years.

  9. Animals

    How many wildebeest? Ask a satellite

    High-resolution satellite imagery could offer a reliable way to count large mammals in open habitats from space.

  10. Animals

    Little African cats need big parks

    Protecting African wildcats requires large protected areas free of feral cats to avoid the risk of the wild species disappearing through hybridization.

  11. Animals

    China’s reindeer are on the decline

    A small, semi-domesticated population of reindeer found in northern China is suffering due to threats ranging from inbreeding to tourism.

  12. Animals

    Starving mantis females lie to make a meal of a male

    When in desperate straits, a female false garden mantid turns into a femme fatale, emitting false chemical cues that lures in a male to eat.