Knowable
Magazine provides in-depth, intelligent
journalism across a broad array of scientific disciplines. It launched in October 2017,
with the goal to cultivate public understanding of science by making expert
knowledge accessible to all.
“Knowable Magazine is off to a fast start. We are
delighted to see this early effort grow into a powerful, lively and
authoritative voice for understanding science. It is finding a wide audience
that enjoys science; they benefit from the unique depth and breadth of Annual
Reviews,” said Robert Kirshner,
Chief Program Officer of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Science
Program.
Annual Reviews President and Editor-in-Chief Richard Gallagher said: “We are deeply grateful to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their continuing support of $1.6 million over two years”.
Duflo was a founding Editorial Committee Member of the Annual Review of Economics. Listen to a 2011 interview in which she discusses the methods she developed and for which she is being recognised, in English and French.
We’ve made these articles freely available to celebrate this achievement:
Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. To find out how we create our highly cited reviews and stimulate discussion about science, please watch this short video. Members of the media can visit our Press Center to sign up for journal access.
Congratulations to our contributing authors John B. Goodenough, of the University of Texas at Austin, who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with M. Stanley Wittingham, of Binghamton University and Akira Yoshino, of the Asahi Kasei Corporation and Meijo University, “for the development of lithium-ion batteries.”
We’ve made these articles freely available to celebrate this achievement:
Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. To find out how we create our highly cited reviews and stimulate discussion about science, please watch this short video. Members of the media can visit our Press Center to sign up for journal access.
Congratulations to our contributing author P. James E. Peebles, of Princeton University, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology.” He shares it with Michel Mayor, of the University of Geneva, and Didier Queloz, also of the University of Geneva and of the University of Cambridge, who won it “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a sola-type star.”
Read P.J.E. Peebles’ autobiographical article and watch him in conversation with Sandra Faber, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is the co-Editor of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics:
Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. To find out how we create our highly cited reviews and stimulate discussion about science, please watch this short video. Members of the media can visit our Press Center to sign up for journal access.
Congratulations to our contributing authors William G. Kaelin, Jr., of Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Gregg L. Semenza, of Johns Hopkins University, who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe, of Oxford University, “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”
We’ve made these articles freely available to celebrate this achievement:
Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. To find out how we create our highly cited reviews and stimulate discussion about science, please watch this short video. Members of the media can visit our Press Center to sign up for journal access.
The NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing has been presented annually since 1979 to recognize authors, whose reviews have synthesized extensive and difficult material, rendering a significant service to science and influencing the course of scientific thought. The field rotates among biological, physical, and social sciences.
The NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing was established in 1977 by the gift of Annual Reviews and the Institute for Scientific Information in honor of J. Murray Luck (our founder). The award is currently sponsored entirely by Annual Reviews.
The 2020 award recognizes authors who, through their conceptual consideration and review of the field, have both rendered a significant service to science and had a profound influence on the course of scientific thought.
To nominate a review author in the field of the Social Sciences, you must submit your application by October 7tht, 2019.
Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society.
The NAS is a private, nonprofit society of distinguished scholars. Established by an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the NAS is charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. The NAS is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community.
June 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an uprising of the LGBTQ+ community in New York City that is credited for sparking the gay rights movement in the United States.
To commemorate the anniversary, we are offering access to four articles that explore health, law, research, and public opinion of the LGBTQ+ community. They are all freely available to read.
“There have been extraordinary changes in public understanding and acceptance of LGBT people and issues, and significant advances have been made in scientific understanding of LGBT youth mental health. At the same time, critical gaps in knowledge continue to prevent the most effective policies, programs, and clinical care from addressing mental health for LGBT young people.”
“In a review of courts’ use of social science evidence on same-sex parenting and the immutability of homosexuality, Levit notes ‘a fairly dramatic shift in the past twenty years, [in which] science is becoming an ally to rather than an oppressor of gays and lesbians.’ Levit’s observation receives support from a recent study of citation patterns in social science research on the effect of parents’ sexual orientation on child outcomes.”
“The prediction that transgender people would fall into the dustbin of history proved to be far off the mark. In the 1980s and 1990s, vibrant activism by transgender and gender nonconforming people around their economic and social marginalization, the medical regulation of their identities, and the legal restrictions on cross-dressing in public that were still on the books in many cities and states gained more visibility.”
“With television shows such as Ellen and Will & Grace, even people who would not necessarily know an out gay individual have an opportunity to virtually know one. (…) Multiple studies have found that knowing someone who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender is associated with more supportive attitudes. Moreover, the degree of contact matters. People are more likely to have positive views when they have a closer relationship with someone who is gay (Brewer 2007). It is harder to express negative views and discriminate against someone if the person is a close friend or family member.”
Using the EHT, scientists obtained an image of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87, outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.
A team of astronomers published the first photograph of a black hole. The “monster,” as they’ve called it, is 40 million kilometers across (about 3 million times the size of Earth), located at the center of a galaxy known as Messier 87, about 500 million trillion kilometers away.
The image was captured by a network of eight telescopes named Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), and assembled with an algorithm developed by young computer scientist Katie Bouman.
This is an incredibly exciting result. I was expecting something good but was even more amazed and impressed by the results than I had expected to be. It really is a testament to the hard work of hundreds of people over decades that we have been able to take this first real picture of what it looks like close to a black hole.
What new paths for research do you expect this will open?
The observations will continue to get better as the technology improves and new telescopes are added across the Earth, and maybe even in space. This will enable even better pictures of what the gas looks like close to a black hole. Over time, I think this will allow us to develop a better understanding of what is happening not only near the black holes that EHT can observe, but of all black holes across the Universe. This will impact a huge range of problems in astrophysics, from our understanding of how galaxies form and are affected by black holes to our understanding of the warped strong gravity very close to the event horizon of a black hole.
What articles can you recommend for readers who want to learn more about black hole research?
Nonprofit publisher Annual Reviews is pleased to announce that Rachel Ehrenberg has been appointed Associate Editor for Knowable Magazine.
Editor-in-Chief Eva Emerson welcomed her, saying:
“Rachel is a skilled reporter and writer, with a great track record producing accurate, high-quality science journalism. She has been a contributor to Knowable since its launch, writing some of our most notable articles, including What Makes a Tree a Tree? and a story on efforts to improve photosynthesis. We are thrilled to have her join our team.”
– Editor-in-Chief Eva Emerson
A native of Vermont, Rachel studied political science and botany at her home state’s school before obtaining a master’s in evolutionary biology from the University of Michigan. She then switched careers, graduating from the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Rachel was a staff writer at Science News for several years, where she reported on interdisciplinary sciences and chemistry and wrote the Culture Beaker blog. She was a 2013-2014 Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and then a freelance journalist focused on the intersection of plants, food and public health.
Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly research, punctuated with forays into wonder and awe. Review articles written by leading scholars from the nearly 50 Annual Review journals serve as springboards for stories in the online-only magazine. Through in-depth features, explainers, articles, essays, interviews, infographics, slideshows and comics, Knowable Magazine bridges the gap between review articles written by invited experts and the information needs of a broader audience. This journalistic initiative receives generous support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and benefit of society. Please visit the Annual Reviews Press Center to sign up for media-only access to journal content.
Xihong Lin is the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics, professor of statistics, and coordinating director of the Program in Quantitative Genomics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
She was elected for her “contributions to statistics, genetics, epidemiology, and environmental health through influential and ingenious research in statistical methods and applications in whole-genome sequencing association studies, gene-environment, integrative analysis, and complex observational studies.”
Warmest congratulations from all of us at Annual Reviews.
