Karen Lips is well-aware of the importance of strategic science communication in affecting environmental policy. In November 2014, she and her colleague Joseph Mendelson published an op-ed in the New York Times warning of a pathogenic fungus spreading among European salamanders that could decimate salamander populations in the United States. She and Mendelson urged prompt government action. Within a year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued an interim rule that shut down importation of 201 salamander species to the U.S. “Getting to the New York Times was key,” she says, in making this a higher policy priority.

Beth Shapiro shares thoughts on her award-winning book, How To Clone a Mammoth, in this Spotlight on Science Writers post.

Examples of “fake news,” such as a report that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, are the equivalent of a bad cold in the body politic, says Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale University. But much more troubling, he told a session of the 2017 AAAS Annual Meeting, are the “toxic memes” Trump has mastered that represent what he called “a cancer” on enlightened democracy.

The nation’s leading scientific, engineering and academic organizations are calling on President Donald Trump to rescind the executive order on immigration and visas issued on 27 January, declaring it damaging to scientific progress, innovation and U.S. science and engineering capacity.