NCSWA’s Coming Attractions:

Thursday, May 17, join NCSWA members for a dinner event with Stanford associate professor Atul Butte, who will explain how science is being transformed by the data revolution. Butte's lab team has mined databases to find a gene that may play a causal role in Type 2 diabetes and has produced the equivalent of a molecular Match.com to identify off-patent drugs that are candidates to treat diseases.

Join us at Mijita, a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco's Ferry Building, at 6:30 p.m. for
appetizers, a buffet dinner and talk. For more information and to register, visit the NCSWA Website.

Special tour of Buckminster Fuller exhibit at Museum of Modern Art
Saturday, July 14, NCSWA members are invited to a special tour of "The Utopian
Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area" at SF MOMA. This tour will be held for NCSWA members alone, starting at 1:30 p.m. for about an hour. To read more about the exhibit, visit the SFMOMA Website. More information coming soon!

Coast Range Hike and Overnight Camp at Angelo Reserve
Saturday, August 25, the University of California's Natural Reserve System is opening its private land at Angelo Coast Range Reserve, north of Fort Bragg, to NCSWA members for a hike guided by UC Berkeley scientists talking about research at the site. The hike will be followed by an (optional) overnight stay, camping or bunking in cabins. Members are invited to bring spouses, partners and kids. More information to come, but mark your calendars for this special event.

Miss the March dinner? Read about it here:

Stanford neuroscientist Tom Rando joined NCSWA at the Basque Cultural Center for a talk on how humans may one day reset the aging clock. Rando is pursuing evidence that substances found in the blood of the young may be able to rejuvenate aging bodies, as seen in lab studies of mice. Rando's work suggests it may be possible to identify biochemical stimuli that can induce stem cells in old tissues to repair injuries as effectively as in young tissues. This may have implications for the fields of regenerative medicine and stem cell transplantation.

NCSWA About Town

Janet Byron and Robin Meadows were part of a team that won a bronze award for technical publications from ACE (the Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Life and Human Sciences) for California Agriculture's special issue called "Food as Medicine: Can what we eat help cure what ails us?" Robin also won an ACE bronze award for a news article called "Biofactors in food linked to
health benefits" that was in the same issue. Janet won a silver ACE award for
editing a research article called "California agritourism operations and their
economic potential are growing" in the April-June 2011 issue of California Agriculture.

Liza Gross, senior editor at PLoS Biology and a freelance writer, started blogging for KQED Quest in February at http://science.kqed.org/quest/author/lizagross/. She
writes primarily about ecology, wildlife and environment health, and she says
she'll try to keep posts on mountain lions to a minimum.

Christine Heinrichs is organizing an evening at Hearst Castle with videos and adventure by marine biologist Holly Lohuis, field producer for Jean-Michel Cousteau's Ocean Future
Society underwater video team. She'll describe her experiences while showing
video on Hearst Castle Theater's giant 50-foot screen in San Simeon, Saturday
May 5. $10 tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/234433.

Judith Horstman is publishing her fourth book on the brain, The Scientific American Healthy Aging Brain: The Neuroscience of Making the Most of Your Mature Mind, in late May.

Robin Marks, president of NCSWA, is teaming up with Fog City Tutoring on a series of three summer science writing workshops for kids grades 5-8, called "Discovering Writing through Science Explorations."

John Moir received the first-place award for the 2012 Outstanding Profile Article from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Moir's article, "The Chameleon," appeared in
the Washington Post's Sunday magazine and tells the story of a US Fish & Wildlife Service undercover agent who works to save endangered species. The award was presented at the ASJA conference in New York City in April.

Corinna Wuis consulting with the Minerva Foundation on media outreach for the Tenth International Conference on Neuroesthetics, "The Importance of Being Playful," a free eventthat takes place on May 26-27 at UC Berkeley.

New Members:

Sara Reardon of San Francisco, a reporter for New Scientist.

Deborah Cowing, an aspiring science writer. After getting her PhD in molecular biology and doing post-doctoral research at UCSF, she took off time to raise two kids and is now
hoping to break into science writing.

Kathleen Masterson, who formerly reported for Harvest Public Media in Des Moines, Iowa. She recently took an environment reporter position with Capital Public Radio in
Sacramento, where she will continue to follow agriculture and environment issues.

Miriam Pinchuk of San Francisco, a freelance writer and editor who recently returned to the Bay Area. Her interests are medicine, the environment and scientific literacy - making science accessible to people who think science is too difficult.

ShaunParker, a student at SF State.

Brenda Mengeling of Davis.

NCSWA’S Coming Attraction: Save the Date

March 21 Spring Dinner Meeting

Wednesday, March 21, join NCSWA members for our spring dinner event to hear Stanford neuroscientist Tom Rando talk about whether we can reset the aging clock. Rando is pursuing evidence that we mortals might someday be able to rejuvenate our aging bodies with substances found in the blood of youngsters. Doors open at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco at 6:30 p.m. For more information and to register, visit http://www.ncswa.org/dinner_2012_03_21.html

Miss the Annual Holiday Dinner with Cris Benton? Read about it here:

NCSWA members gathered  at Jannah restaurant in San Francisco for the annual holiday event featuring our science trivia contest and a presentation from UC Berkeley professor Cris Benton, who showed the spectacular results of his pioneering work in kite aerial photography. Benton has been documenting the restoration of wetlands in San Francisco Bay following the purchase of 15,000 acres of salt ponds from Cargill in 2003.   

Awards, Fellowships and Coming Deadlines

Entries are due March 15 for the Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism. The prize is given for journalism in any media that best illuminates an environmental issue or story in western Canada, the United States or Mexico. Entries must be focused on an environmental subject occurring in or affecting the North American West, and must have been published, broadcast or posted during 2011. Entry forms for the Knight-Risser Prize are available at http://knightrisser.stanford.edu

Entries are due April 2 for the Society of Environmental Journalists Awards for Reporting on the Environment. SEJ has added a category for photojournalism. Cash prizes are award for seven categories including books, print, online and broadcast. For more information, visit http://www.sej.org/initiatives/awards/instructions

Applications are due May 15 for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Ocean Science Journalism Fellowships. The one-week program introduces science journalists to the fields of oceanography and ocean engineering. Ideal candidates should have at least two years of writing, producing, or editing experience for a general-interest audience. For more information, see http://www.whoi.edu/osj

 
NCSWA About Town

Jascha Hoffman, a science writer, is also a songwriter and he will release his new album, “The Future Limited,” on March 6. It is available for free download at www.thefuturelimited.com. There is also a science-fiction music video from the album , titled “Jascha – ‘Limited,’” by filmmaker and fellow science journalist John Pavlus, with mashed-up scenes from five classic science fiction films including “2001,” “Robocop” and “Tron.” They depict a lonely machine searching for human contact. See it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhYDn1QWs-Q

Norm Sperling, editor of the Journal of Irreproducible Results, is getting ready to embark on his several-year, cross-country “Great Science Trek” in fall 2012. He describes it on his blog in “Tell Me Where to Go, And What to Do When I Get There,” at www.everythingintheuniverse.com/node/76. In preparation for his move from a 2,000-square-foot house to a 200-square-foot RV, he’ll be selling a few thousand science books, if anyone is interested.

David Gilbert, public affairs manager at DOE’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, writes to say NCSWA members can have free registration to the Genomics of Energy & Environment meeting. For more information, visit http://www.jgi.doe.gov/meetings/usermeeting

Christine Heinrichs was off to Gainesville, Florida, on Feb. 22 to attend Cinema Verde, http://www.verdefest.org/, for a showing of “Mad City Chickens,” a documentary in which she was interviewed. She’ll talk about chickens and sell her book, ”How to Raise Chickens.”

Diane Kern has a new blog at www.phenomenalmind.com. She is posting frequently to outline the framework of a new psychology that is cross-fertilized by neuroscience, particularly the treatment of the brain as an information management system. She invites visitors to look at “mind stuff” in ways that are scientifically accurate and beneficial.
 
Danna Staaf has joined the science blogging team at KQED Quest.  She writes about the intersection of science and art – and sometimes food, too. Danna is a cephalopodiatrist and she has blogs at http://cephalopodiatrist.com and http://science20.com/squid_day

 Joe Devney has started teaching an undergraduate class in linguistics at Holy Names University.

Christina Deptula is an editor at Synchronized Chaos magazine who is recruiting nonfiction and sci-fi writers. She also gives personal tours of Oakland’s Chabot Space and Science Center and pursues freelance writing while caring for her elderly grandmother.

Kris Novak is now blogging about GI disorders at http://agajournals.wordpress.com /. She also still works as science editor of the American Gastroenterological Association, editing research and review articles as well as writing news.

New Members

Hemai Parthasarathy, a senior partner at Torch Communications in San Francisco, specializes in scientific communications for biotech companies and research institutes.

Eric Katz  of Oakland.

Cat Aboudara, a freelance blogger for KQED Quest who is interested in starting a bi-weekly writing salon in San Francisco.

Jon Weiner, manager of communications & media relations for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and former head of media relations at Caltech. Prior to that, he served as executive director of public relations for USC's Health Sciences Campus in Los Angeles and, for 10 years, worked in the broadcast news business at CBS News and CBS and NBC affiliates around the country.

Michael Coren of San Francisco, a reporter covering science, economics and the environment for FastCompany, Foreign Policy and other magazines. He co-founded MajorPlanet Studios to produce multimedia narratives for tablets and the Web. He was a science editor of CNN.com, managing editor of Cambodia's Phnom Penh Post and a Jakarta-based correspondent for Newsweek and the Christian Science Monitor.

Elizabeth Devitt of Capitola, a veterinarian and freelance writer.

Alexander Mayer of Oakland.

Michael Woods of Menlo Park, a Public Information Officer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC).

Emily Coren of Santa Cruz, a science writer and illustrator at WalkaboutEm.com, an interactive, informal science education platform. She is using new media to improve accessibility to science through an exploratory illustrated medium.

Katherine Bourzac, a freelancer in San Francisco.

Norma VelazquezUlloa of San Francisco.

Ann Thryft of Boulder Creek, a freelance writer specializing in technology, environment and technology features.

Anne Stauffer of San Jose.

Phyllis Brown of Sacramento.

Monique Inciarte of El Cerrito.

Quynh Tran of Castro Valley.

Holiday Dinner with Cris Benton
Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley

Intimate Aerials: Photography using Kite-Lofted Cameras
Join us for Middle Eastern food with a NorCal twist and a speaker who's above the rest (literally) at our annual holiday shindig. Cris Benton's talk will chronicle 15 years of aerial photography using kite-lofted cameras that offer a fresh perspective of familiar landscapes in ways that challenge our spatial sensibilities. The technique yields images from a range of altitudes (10-300 feet above the ground) that are too low for conventional aircraft. Benton will show examples from the Bay Area including the South San Francisco Bay Salt Ponds that are being restored as wetlands. His talk will touch on the history of aerial photography, the equipment and techniques used and motivations for using kites in today. As an art form or a remote sensing tool, Cris' low-level approach yields images that are both beautiful and useful. Click on the following link for more information.

Miss the Oct. 4 dinner meeting with Colin Milburn? Read about it here:

NCSWA members gathered at Pyramid Ale House in Berkeley to hear Colin Milburn, a UC Davis professor, talk about whether science fiction leads the way to scientific discovery. Milburn described how our culture influences the direction of scientific research, with molecular biologists and nanotechnology researchers exploiting unique properties of video games to run innovative experiments. 


Coming Award Deadlines:

Entries for the National Association of Science Writers annual Science in Society Journalism Award are due by Feb. 1, 2012, for material published or broadcast in 2011. Entry forms will be available at www.nasw.org beginning in December. Click on the following NASW link for more information, where you can also see the 2010 rules and entry categories, and scroll down for each previous year's winners.

Nominations for the American Geophysical Union’s annual awards contest for excellence in science journalism open on Jan. 15, 2012, with a deadline of March 15. The AGU’s David Perlman Award, named for San Francisco Chronicle’s science reporter, recognizes work published with deadline pressure of one week or less and comes with a stipend of $5,000. The AGU’s Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence is given for science feature writing, defined as work prepared with a deadline of more than one week. For more information, visit the AGU’s site and fill in the window for a keyword search with “science journalism.”

Journalists from all media are invited to submit entries in January for the seventh annual Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment, which awards $75,000 to the top winner. Up to three additional entries will receive $5,000 awards of special merit. Book entries must be postmarked by Jan. 9, 2012, and all other entries by Jan. 30. More information is available at http://www.granthamprize.org .

Entries for the Thomas L. Stokes Award for Best Energy Writing, sponsored by the National Press Foundation, are due by Jan. 31, 2012. The competition has a $1,000 award and citation for best analysis, commentary or reporting on the subject of energy and natural resources, in any form undefined oil, gas, coal, nuclear, water, solar, etc. The work must have been published in the U.S. between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. Visit the website at http://nationalpress.org/awards/detail/thomas-l.-stokes-award-for-best-energy-writing/ for details.


NCSWA About Town:

--Robert Adler wrote the cover story for New Scientist’s Nov. 26 issue, on the different kinds of “multiverses” we might live in, including our own universe and the multitude of string-theory universes. Check it out online if you have a subscription, or you may find a print copy at Barnes & Noble stores, Robert says.

--Judith Horstman will publish her third book (in a series of four) on the brain for Scientific American, in late December. Titled “The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex and the Brain: The Neuroscience of How, When, Why and Who We Love,”  the book will be available on Amazon.com at http://amzn.to/mUITLg

--Janet Byron and Robin Meadows are writing a fun field guide to California agriculture called “What’s That Crop?” Designed to help us identify crops at 65 miles per hour, their book will be published by Heyday. Until then, you can follow along on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/WhatsThatCrop , on Tumblr at http://whatsthatcrop.tumblr and Twitter at http://twitter.com/#/WhatsThatCrop .

--Norm Sperling, editor of the Journal of Irreproducible Results, reports that his latest paperback, “Don’t Try This in High School,” was published in May. Topics in the biology section include “Insect Rights” and “Budgies as Weapons,” while the math section has “Rebuttal to Multiplication” and another section has “Deep Space Hand Salutes.” A book description is available on Sperling’s blog at http://www.everythingintheuniverse.com/blog/dont-try-high-school 

--Mark Shwartz left the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University in August to become communications/energy writer at Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy, http://pie.stanford.edu.

--Andy Freeberg has started work as the media manager in the office of communications at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford. NCSWA members who have any questions about SLAC are welcome to contact him at afreeberg@slac.stanford.edu .

--Paul Kleyman of New American Media just returned from a Boston meeting where NAM collaborated with the Gerontological Society of America to conduct a program on aging for 16 journalists from the ethnic and mainstream media. The program, supported by $100,000 from the MetLife Foundation, provided each reporter with a $1,500 stipend plus meeting trip expenses. For a list of the second-year fellows, including some from Northern California, visit http://newamericamedia.org/gsa-2012.php.

--Christine Heinrichs attended the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Miami, including the post-conference tour of the Keys. She participated in the release of a rehabilitated loggerhead sea turtle from The Turtle Hospital on Marathon Key. Visit the photos and videos she posted at http://elephantseals.blogspot.com/2011/11/sea-tutrle-release-in-florida.html.

New Members:

Suzanne Spong, associate director for cell biology at Fibrinogen, who is hoping to get more involved in science writing.

Hemai Parthasarathy of San Francisco

Eric Katz of Oakland