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This paper will outline the very successful initiatives to define common communication strategies amongst the world’s high energy physics laboratories. These initiatives have been extremely successful in changing the communication practices of a worldwide community of high energy physics labs and these practices are now expanding to the community of synchrotron radiation laboratories. The payback has been extremely encouraging, with a much higher regard for the importance of communication in senior management and, perhaps coincidentally, major increases in funding of physical sciences in the United States and other countries

It’s hard to be a science journalist these days. Still tired because of the “Long night of Science“ (probably the 6th during this summer) he or she is informed about the next “Children’s University days” and another “girls day” coming soon – alongside the daily zapping through the 50 press releases of the informationsdienst wissenschaft1 (are there really 50 newsworthy things happening every day in the labs of every European country?), not to speak of the dozens of press packages and glossy brochures of the pharmaceutical industry as well as the test kits of new products like a tongue cleaner (of which the phenomenal results are – of course – “scientifically proved”). In 2006 a journalist sometimes would wish that science communicators would communicate a little bit less – giving himself a little bit more time to find his own stories – just by himself.

An informal, online survey of 1,059 reporters and public information officers, conducted this year by EurekAlert! (www.eurekalert.org), the science-news Web service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), seems to confirm key challenges associated with communicating science in a post-print, increasingly multi-media-focused era. As many newspapers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other regions continue to down-size, reporters still covering science and technology say they increasingly need good-quality images, as well as rapid access to researchers capable of making science more understandable to lay audiences. The EurekAlert! findings, released 16 August during the Euroscience Open Forum 2006 meeting in Munich, Germany, suggest that beyond the predictable reporter concerns of learning about breaking research news before the competition or the public, top concerns for today’s reporters are “finding researchers who can explain science,” and “obtaining photographs or other multimedia to support the story.” Judging the trustworthiness or integrity of scientific findings while avoiding “hype” also emerged as key concerns for 614 reporters who participated in the EurekAlert! survey, along with 445 public information officers.

The attacks of September 11 2001 and in particular, the sending of letters containing anthrax spores the following October had a profound effect on society, and at the same time on science and its communicative mechanisms. Through a quanto-qualitative analysis of articles taken from four publications: two daily newspapers, the Corriere della Sera from Italy and the New York Times from the United States and two science magazines, Science and Nature, we have shown how the aforementioned events provoked the emergence of media attention regarding bioterrorism. A closer reading of the articles shows that today, science – including that found in science magazines – is closely related to politics, economics and the debate over the freedom to practice communicate. The very mechanisms of communication between scientists were changed as a result of this debate, as can be seen from the signing of the Denver Declaration in February 2003, which brought about the preventative self-censorship of publication of biomedical research findings.

The Royal Society published in late June a report entitled «Science Communication. Survey of factors affecting science communication by scientists and engineers». It is an in-depth survey on the communication addressed to non-specialist audiences that was carried out interviewing a wide and representative sample of UK scientists and engineers.

Science information professionals need to make choices through which media they want to communicate with the public. In reaching large audiences outside the domain of formal diffusion of knowledge, the choice may be between the old medium television and the new medium Internet. It seems that general scientific research is focused more and more on the Internet as a favorite means for information exchange and that the old mass medium television plays only a minor role. But when we look at (1) how the public spends their leisure time on television and the Internet, (2) how effective these media are in transferring information, and (3) how much these media are trusted as reliable sources of information, the old medium television should still be regarded as the number one medium to be used for science communication, although there are some limitations for its use.

The American particle physics community is in jeopardy and may end up drowning in a boundless sea trying to grasp at non-existing funds, dragging US physics and science as a whole to the bottom. This is a price the most powerful and high-tech country of the world cannot afford, as warned by the editors of a report published in late April by the National Academy of Sciences1. Behind so much alarm is the International Linear Collider (ILC) – a large particle accelerator facility which, according to the report, should be built on American territory, if research on the elementary constituents of nature is to survive in the United States. The ILC will probably cost a total of five hundred million dollars in the first five years, whereas billions will have to be invested in the subsequent seven years. Hardly impressive, however, if compared with the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the biggest and costliest machine ever conceived in the history of science. Devised to describe the first instants of the universe, as many will recall, the SSC project was severely hampered by political and bureaucratic plots in 1993, when the Clinton administration decided to halt work on the accelerator, after ten years and approximately two billion dollars already spent.

The many facets of fundamentalism. There has been much talk about fundamentalism of late. While most people's thought on the topic go to the 9/11 attacks against the United States, or to the ongoing war in Iraq, fundamentalism is affecting science and its relationship to society in a way that may have dire long-term consequences. Of course, religious fundamentalism has always had a history of antagonism with science, and – before the birth of modern science – with philosophy, the age-old vehicle of the human attempt to exercise critical thinking and rationality to solve problems and pursue knowledge. “Fundamentalism” is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of the Social Sciences1 as “A movement that asserts the primacy of religious values in social and political life and calls for a return to a 'fundamental' or pure form of religion.” In its broadest sense, however, fundamentalism is a form of ideological intransigence which is not limited to religion, but includes political positions as well (for example, in the case of some extreme forms of “environmentalism”).

I would like to celebrate not one, but two major news stories about evolution that help further cast the forces of intellectual darkness — meaning creationism and intelligent design — back into the shadows where they belong.

The debate on Darwin’s theory of evolution is a unique case for observing some particular ways in which science is perceived and experienced in society. It is a dispute which is really not very scientific at all, since it ultimately derives from the attempt to discredit a corroborated scientific explanation (and to limit its teaching) by fundamentalist fringe groups of religious and political movements of various extraction. However, it is undeniable that the clash between creationists and evolutionists must also involve, in a critical and self-reflective way, the communicative weaknesses of science and its inability to assert itself as a widespread and fully shared culture, as was also stressed by the Nature magazine in April 2005. With an international viewpoint, ranging from the United States to Europe, from Australia to Italy, in this dossier we try to make a summary investigation of the current state of the debate, with a particularly attentive eye on the communicative strategies that contend in the two fields.