The 2011 edition of the World Conference of Science Journalists will take place at the edge of significant new developments in undersea archeology. One optional workshop will take participants from the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Cairo to the port of Alexandria. There, they will watch how robotic submarines and other technology help archeologists find ancient shipwrecks and investigate their cargoes.

The Seventh World Conference of Science Journalists in Cairo, 27 – 29 June 2010, is less than a year away. Organizers have already lined up workshops to take reporters deeper into their assignments, seminars to help frame the reporting of science globally, and help in storytelling with the multimedia tools that are increasingly available from anyone’s laptop.

A graduate student in science journalism from Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany was at the European Science Open Forum in Barcelona a couple of years ago. She met a countryman, Jan Lublinski, and they talked.

The Executive Board of the World Federation of Science Journalists has asked its member associations to allow a change to its voting system. If approved the change would enable any member of affiliated associations to apply to be considered as a candidate for the Board.

Gervais Mbarga teaches communications and journalism at Université de Moncton in Canada and recently found himself heading up a team of “mentors.” These experienced science journalists will help general-assignment journalists in Africa, and the Middle East become better able to report on science.

Following the Board meeting in Turino, the WFSJ mid-term Report is now available

Pouria Nazemi is an amateur astronomer in Tehran, and he’s been at it for 16 years. He’s also science editor for Jam-e-Jam, Tehran’s largest newspaper, and he’s agreed to translate the World Federation of Science Journalism’s online reporting course from English into Farsi, the language of Iran.

The 7th World Conference of Science Journalists that will be organized in Cairo, Egypt in 2011 is organizing a reception in partnership with the Research, Development and Innovation Programme – Egypt – during ESOF on July 6 at Il Circolo dei Lettori. Come mingle with the conference organizers and learn about the conference program and Egyptian science. More importantly, come for good food and drink and don't miss receiving a crystal pyramid made in Egypt!

Rosalia Omungo was reflecting on the Canadian Association of Science Writers 2010 conference during its closing hours on a June evening in Ottawa, Canada.

Take one of the most persistent mathematical mysteries in the world, one that underlies secrecy in everything from national spy agencies to shopping on the Internet, and figure out how to make sense of it visually for television.

The Turkish-language version of the WFSJ online journalism course has landed on our website, and a former radio news director in Turkey thinks it’s not a moment too soon.

Only if they attend ABSW’s July conference - Science reporters worldwide grapple with the complexities of molecular biology – the DNA watershed and all that has followed since. But reporters and editors in the U.K. will have an opportunity in July to get up close and personal with the knowledge available from genomics, the new “consumer” service that has emerged from DNA sequencing

‘In rude health’ but ‘under threat’. This is the state of science journalism in Britain, according to the January 2010 report ‘Science and the Media: Securing the Future’.

Canadian science journalists, key donors, and some 40 friends and collaborators, celebrated, on Monday 12th April 2012, the opening of the new offices of the World Federation of Science Journalists, in Gatineau, a city situated in Québec, right beside Ottawa, the capital City of Canada.

There has been so much written about ScienceOnline 2010 that for me to try to encapsulate in yet another blog post seems pointless. ScienceOnline 2010 was an “unconference” of folks dedicated to communicating science and science issues through the internet.  It was held at Sigma Xi headquarters in the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

The best way for me to post about this conference is to point you to the vast amount of posts.  Perhaps you will discover a new blog to follow.

ScienceOnline 2010 Blog and Media Coverage: http://www.scienceonline2010.com/index.php/wiki/BlogMedia_Coverage/

I’m going to single out A Blog Around the Clock’s post Journalism at ScienceOnline 2010: http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2010/01/journalism_at_scienceonline201.php. He offers a fantastic reading list regarding science journalism.

People expect a lot from scientists. Preferably ready-made, unambiguous answers, valid for eternity. But because of science’s critical character and rigorous reality checks of hypotheses, different scientists can give different answers to the same questions. If these questions concern cutting edge research, this is more the rule than the exception. Only after years or even decades of extensive checks do some scientific hypotheses make it into the handbooks of science, that are hardly doubted anymore. But even some scientific handbook might get overthrown after some time.

Furthermore, even the best scientists at the time can be terribly mistaken. When American physicist Charles Townes in 1951 started to think about microwave amplification by the stimulation emission of radiation – a maser, the microwave equivalent and predecessor of the laser – Nobel prize winner Isidor Isaac Rabi and Polykarp Kusch, who was yet to win the Nobel prize, told Townes that it was impossible and asked him to stop his research. Luckily Townes didn’t stop and developed the first maser only two years later, which won him the 1964 Nobel prize.

The story repeats itself with the development of the laser. Townes’ brother-in-law Arthur Schawlow, who was also to win a Nobel prize, had predicted that it was impossible to build a laser with ruby as a laser medium. The young Theodore Maiman wasn’t convinced and started his intensive research at Hughes Research Laboratories. The Hughes management however, trusting Schawlow’s prediction, discouraged Maiman’s ruby-research. Maiman stubbornly continued, and in 1960, this year exactly fifty years ago, he demonstrated the first laser…with ruby as a laser medium. The great freedom to doubt the thoughts of even the best scientists led Townes to the maser and Maiman to the laser. Uncertainty in science is a strong stimulus for creativity.

By better understanding the role of uncertainty in science we may better understand what science can and cannot offer society. Uncertainty in science has essentially three roots: in measurements, in data analysis and in models (both conceptual, physical and numerical). Scientists try to get rid of uncertainties as much as possible, but cannot get rid of all of them. Therefore, science is first of all a process that separates the evidently untrue from the possibly true. This is very different from the public perception that science is an encyclopedia of absolutely true facts.

Unfortunately, when people hear scientists saying they don’t know everything, they often conclude that they know nothing, or that one opinion is as good as any other, or that evident blunders in the IPCC-report make the whole report worthless. Uncertain science, however, is something different from bad science. There are degrees in uncertainty, varying from extremely uncertain to virtually certain. Hardly anything in science is absolutely certain. Watch below what physicist and Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman had to say on uncertainty: “It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong…I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things.”

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