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Everything evolves. Plant and animal species adapt to their environments. Rocks, under heat or pressure, shift form. Earth revolves around a sun that traces its arc of existence through the ever changing cosmos. And with this issue, Scientific American introduces the latest design and content adjustments in its 165-year history, ready to embrace the next 165.
Longtime readers will see much that is familiar in the magazine and its Web site, www.ScientificAmerican.com, from the classic design to the hallmark informational graphics. As always, collaborations with scientists—as authors of the feature articles and as sources for top journalists—inform everything we do.
In recent months we have explored what improvements we could add to Scientific American’s traditional strengths, to make its print and digital editions more useful for readers.
You made it clear that the feature articles are important to your relationship with Scientific American. You want to dive deep into the science in some articles but also enjoy some shorter pieces. You want a variety of topics, from basic research to technologies, from physical sciences to life sciences. This issue delivers: in our cover story, biologist Jonathan K. Pritchard tells us “How We Are Evolving.” Physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow describe “The (Elusive) Theory of Everything.” Other articles look at the wonder of an octopus sucker, the challenge of designing ethical robots, the true value of the Human Genome Project, the tribulations of parents with autistic children and the production of fuels using “artificial photosynthesis."
We know science’s role is important to you. So in a first, we created an exclusive poll on attitudes about science. We worked with Scientific American’s 14 international editions around the globe and with our sister publication, Nature, the weekly international journal of science, to conduct the poll online. Don’t miss “In Science We Trust.”
We have sharpened the monthly departments as well. In Science Agenda, the Board of Editors analyzes a top science issue, while an expert comments on another critical policy area in Forum. The new Advances provides tightly written updates on key developments in science and technology. In response to readers’ interests in personal well-being and in technology’s influence on their lives, we introduce The Science of Health and TechnoFiles, from best-selling author and New York Times columnist David Pogue. Last, punctuating each issue is a new back-page column, Graphic Science, which tells a story about a complex topic through a powerful informational graphic. As always, we are eager for your thoughts and reactions.
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10 Comments
Add CommentEditors,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI quite like it. I will admit that I was taken off guard this morning, but having had a chance to browse around in this revise UI, I consider it a real improvement over the previous one. The serif font is easier to read, and the way that the articles can be chosen is simple and intuitive.
Well done.
PS. If you are looking for something else to improve, enable - even if only for a few minutes - the poster to edit his or her posts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismeh, it's pretty much the same used up, last minute prom date in a new dress. add a message board that automatically links to the topic of interest, and then I might be inclined to think of the site as something other than a budget rental van.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith regard to the mix of material and quality of feature articles in the October print issue, outstanding job. This is without reservation the best SciAm I have yet read in terms of overall content and depth of science. Keep up the good work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOverall I like the new design, which represents a real improvement. A few thoughts:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. The cover looks great, both in terms of layout, typography, and the photograph. I hope we don't see a return to goofy covers like those of February and March 2008 (http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/cover/cover_2008-02.jpg, http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/cover/cover_2008-03.jpg). Who is that man supposed to be? Doctor Manhattan?
2. I understand there's a tension between having many short pieces on the one hand, and a smaller number of longer-form articles on the other. Personally, I prefer the latter, and this is one of the reasons I started subscribing to American Scientist.
3. The Graphic Science feature is a great idea, but it needs some work. The obesity and risk data could have been expressed with much less ink, and the radial bar chart misleadingly exaggerates differences. The cult of Edward Tufte sometimes goes too far, but it wouldn't hurt to read a few of his books: http://www.edwardtufte.com/
4. Any chance of expanding the book review section? Aside from the excerpt, all we have is a two-sentence review. Again, American Scientist excels in this department, and every issue of Science features at least one meaty review. A two- or three-page review by an expert in the field would be wonderful.
Thanks for listening.
I'm very sorry about the new layout. I'm a long time subscriber -- 25 years or so. The main problem is that the font size is too small (or perhaps the typeface was poorly chosen); I imagine the entire layout was designed by young people with perfect vision, but I can't be the only reader over 55. (Now I sound like a whining old man.) Another problem is that the advertisements and the editorial material are indistinguishable. Take a look at page 18 and 19 of the September issue; which is the ad? Or 2 and 3? Or 20 and 21?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI hope the typeface issues can be resolved; as it is now, it's unreadable, and I won't be re-subscribing (why buy something I can't read).
I share jpgordon’s complaint that the articles and the ads now look the same in the new layout. The fonts used are nearly identical. Except when they aren’t, as the fonts you use for articles are all over the place, depending on the section, article, or even page. I can’t tell you how distracting this all is. Maddening, actually, since for the life of me I cannot understand how SciAm thought this was a good idea. It really seems like a 12 year-old has designed this new layout. Who’s running the show over there?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI’ve been looking to cull the number of magazines I read regularly. You’ve helped me identify the now obvious choice.
I don't like the changes at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a regular reader for thirty years, I've seen several redesigns. In each one, the adds have been more integrated with the content. For example, up until the redesign immediately preceding the present one, the table of contents occupied two facing pages. This was a good layout for the reader, as he could easily see everything in the issue. This was then changed, and in the design phased out in the September issue, the table of contents was on opposite sides of a page. This was not as good as on facing pages, but at least the two pages were close together. In the October 2010 issue, the two pages of the table of contents are separated by three full pages of adds. This redesign was not done for the benefit of the reader.
I understand that competition from the internet has made it harder for a magazine to get sell advertising. If the new advertiser-friendly format is necessary to keep the magazine in business, it's a small price to pay.
My main complaint is the change in content. For me, the primary attraction of Scientific American has been the feature articles written by scientists.
When I started reading Scientific American, a typical issue contained eight such articles, each 6-8 pages long. The October 2009 issue contained seven feature articles; one was 8 pages long and written by a staff writer, one was an 8 page long discussion compiled by the editors, one was 4 pages long and written by a scientist, and four were 8 pages long and written by scientists.
In contrast, the October 2010 issue contains 10 feature articles; four (8, 8, 6, and 4 pages) were written by journalists, one was an interview (4 pages), one was a summary of the results of an online poll (4 pages), and only four (8, 6, 4 and 2 pages) were written by scientists. The number of articles in the November 2010 issue written by scientist is 3, for a total of only 18 pages. In recent years, the number of pages Scientific American devoted to what I considered its best and most distinctive content has been reduced from about 64 pages to 32 pages to 18 pages. I fear that Scientific American is turning into Popular Science.
I wholeheartedly agree with asbasb's comments about how the magazine has become much more superficial. When I browse my copies from the 1970's, 1980's, each issue is like a treasure trove of interesting articles written by leading scientists on their research, some topics which were later awarded the Nobel Prize. Nowadays each issue can be browsed through in one sitting and is more like a throwaway magazine. Even those articles that are written by scientists are too short. This trend started around the late 2000's but has gotten consderably worse. There are way too many short little blurbs that lack any kind of depth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd what's with the new binding that doesn't let the magazine lie flat but snaps it shut when you put it down? HATE IT!
One more comment about the article authors. More and more articles are now written by science journalists. No matter how well written, it doesn't convey the same sense of discovery and fascination from in-depth articles written by scientists doing the research. I urge the editors to bring back those type of articles.
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