The magazine Science News has just turned 100 years old. It began with the year 1922. From the beginning, it has numbered its magazines by semesters, rather than years, so the issues of the second half of 2021 bear the number 200. It is one of the longest-lived magazines of scientific information in existence. But its evolution in recent decades is worrying, and does not bring us to be optimistic about the current state of world science.
- Until
April 2008, the magazine was published every week, with 16
pages and a relatively large number of news items. In the first half of
2007, the 26 issues of the magazine contained 416 news items,
which gives an average of 16 news items per issue. This is equivalent to
more than one news item per page, as from the beginning a part of the pages
of each magazine were used for advertising.
- Since
2008, and until mid-2017, the magazine became biweekly, but 32
pages each, so it seemed that the change had not affected the content. But
looking at what was published in the first half of 2015, we can see that
the 13 issues of the magazine contain 278 news items, which
shows a decrease of 33% and an average of 21.3 news per issue, rather than
32, which would have been needed to maintain the 2007 proportion. The explanation
that the number of news items has decreased, while the total number of
pages remains constant, is that more space (text and images) was dedicated
to each news item.
- As
of mid-2017, maintaining the fortnightly periodicity, the number of
magazines per semester was reduced to 11, because two double numbers
were introduced, which counted as two publications, and thus the
fortnightly periodicity became sometimes monthly, with more pages (52 per
double number), although not twice as many (64), as would have been necessary
to maintain the proportion. In the first half of 2021, the 11 issues of
the magazine contained 216 news items, which shows an
additional decrease of 22% and an average of 19.6 news items per issue, a
result that was obtained, again, by increasing the average size of news,
many of which take one or more pages, while until 2008 the amount of news
with that length was much smaller.
It seems, therefore, that Science News cannot
find now the number of scientific news per semester that it found 14 years ago,
but almost half, so it must reduce the number of publications
and increase the size of each news item.
If we add the continuous increase of the
number of news that does not really correspond to current discoveries, but to unverified
simulations as in this article (9/21/2021
in Science News) or simple future possibilities (perhaps this could
happen…), or to studies to discover whether ancient or modern scientists are or were racist, gay, anti-gay, or womanizing, and that some of the other news are, basically, platitudinous discoveries
as in this
article (7/12/2021 in Science News), the number of scientific news proper
seems to have plummeted in the last 14 years.
If we take into account that many of the
news being published now, rather than scientific, are technological, and that
technology still continues to advance, either by inertia (due to the
application of scientific discoveries from previous decades), or because technological
advances never stop completely, the current prospects for science seem worrying.
In this context, the reduction in the content and requirements of scientific subjects in elementary and secondary education, together with the introduction of ideological indoctrination (usually anti-scientific), even in Mathematics, is not good news. In California, for instance, they intend to change mathematical teaching, for a teacher correcting a student's mistakes is a form of white supremacy, mathematics is not objective, and there are no really correct or wrong answers. Something similar is about to take place in Spain.
The problem is not
that science is dying. We are actually killing it.
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