When I think about what it means to be a science journalist, I think about chocolate.

I’m not kidding.

One night when I went to a talk about the science of food, and one of the presenters, a Harvard professor/master chef, started telling us about the difference between good and bad chocolate. “If you take a bar of good chocolate, like Ghiradelli, and break it in half, you hear a snap.”

“But if you take a bar of cheap chocolate, it’ll break, but you won’t heat the snap. And it may not break cleanly.” Continue reading “Why a science journalist is like a seed crystal (and other thoughts)” »