Dear reader,
In 1848, Michael Faraday stood before a room of children at London’s Royal Institution and lit a candle. A bookbinder’s apprentice who had taught himself science, Faraday had no university degree. But that Christmas, he used a single flame to explain combustion, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and, in a final flourish, human respiration itself. The lectures were published in 1861 as The Chemical History of a Candle and have never gone out of print.
Faraday addressed his young audience as “we philosophers”. He meant it. More than simplifying science for everyone, he was letting them in.
That impulse, of letting people in, is the oldest purpose of science journalism. The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, launched in 1665, was among the first to publish scientific research for a readership beyond scientists. It was a modest but revolutionary act of public knowledge sharing. Scientific American launched in 1845, while Nature arrived in 1869. Each followed a simple conviction: that the findings of science belong to the public, not to the priesthood of specialists.
In 2026, that conviction is among the most endangered ideas in journalism. At a time when pseudoscience, climate denialism, vaccine conspiracies, and algorithmic misinformation have become political weapons, the infrastructure that once brought verified, accessible scientific knowledge to ordinary readers is facing a crisis. Newsrooms are shedding science desks. Science correspondents are disappearing. Popular Science shut its magazine after 151 years of print. National Geographic has laid off most writers and reporters. The BBC’s veteran science correspondent Pallab Ghosh notes that Britain’s Press Association no longer has a single science correspondent. Grants for science, health, and environment journalism in the US fell from $86.5 million in 2021 to $63 million in 2023, and that was before the deeper cuts of 2025 thanks to you-know-who.
Yet the audience for science has never been larger. Veritasium, a YouTube channel run by the Canadian-Australian physicist Derek Muller, has over 20 million subscribers and more than four billion views. Kurzgesagt, a German animation studio that explains everything from black holes to the immune system, draws tens of millions per video. MIT Technology Review’s cheekily titled podcast In Machines We Trust, which probes the social consequences of artificial intelligence, has charted in over 70 countries. The appetite is immense. What is missing is not the reader but the institutional commitment to feed that appetite with rigour.
Nature spent much of its first century as an insider’s journal—collegial, amateurish, useful to working scientists and largely opaque to everyone else. It took John Maddox, a Welsh theoretical chemist who had worked as science correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, to change that. Maddox edited Nature in two stints, from 1966 to 1973 and from 1980 to 1995. He introduced rigorous peer review, but also insisted that the journal speak beyond the laboratory. He built international offices, forged links with broadcasting, and expanded Nature with specialist titles.
When the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste claimed in 1988 that water had “memory”—a finding that would have validated homeopathy—Maddox did not merely reject the paper. He took the investigators to Benveniste’s lab to see the experiments fail. When Rupert Sheldrake published his theory of “morphic resonance” in 1981, Maddox wrote a famously angry editorial. There is an annual award in his name for people who stand up for science. His brand of combative, publicly engaged science editorship has few successors.
Closer home, the Times of India launched a magazine called Science Today in the mid-1960s, among the first popular science publications in the country. The eminent Malayalam writer and physicist C. Radhakrishnan, part of its founding team, went on to organise what was possibly the country’s first science-writing association, the Sastra Sahitya Samithi. Such bridges between science and the public, between English and vernacular readers, remain rare but still necessary.
The Hindu newspaper still has a dedicated science section, an anomaly in the newspaper industry today, which has mostly folded science coverage into “tech”, “health”, or “environment”.
But science is not a beat. And the best science journalism always understood this. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (which first appeared in The New Yorker) changed environment policy worldwide because it was written with the precision of a scientist and the narration of a reporter. In his Cosmos television series, watched by over 500 million people in 60 countries, Carl Sagan refused to treat wonder as the enemy of rigour. Stephen Jay Gould’s essays in Natural History were small philosophical treatises in biological disguise.
In India, the astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar—who died in May last year—spent half a century writing science fiction and popular science in Marathi and Hindi, reaching readers that English publications could not. He won the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for it, and when the Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan chose him as its president in 2021, he became the first science writer in that position. And Narlikar publicly criticised pseudoscience, including astrology.
There is a case to be made that the decline of institutional science journalism in the 2000s and the rise of right-wing pseudoscience across the world are not coincidental. As newsrooms cut science desks through the 2000s, the vacuum was filled by ideologues and algorithm-friendly charlatans. Climate denial became fashionable. Vaccine phobia spread. Claims about ancient flying machines migrated from WhatsApp forwards to government-adjacent conferences.
The correlation is not hard to explain. Science journalism does not just report on discoveries. It teaches the public how evidence works—what a controlled trial means, why a single study is not proof, how consensus builds and changes. When that information disappears, people are left with no framework to distinguish a peer-reviewed paper from a conspiracy video. To blame is the absence of a shared grammar for evaluating claims. That is what science journalism does—it informs accurately.
Today, there are still some bright spots. New Scientist continues to produce science writing of genuine beauty: lucid, witty, unhurried. MIT Technology Review and Wired report with a crisp, modern voice, taking technology seriously without genuflecting to it. Science-focused podcasts are multiplying: Radiolab, the Nature Podcast, Lex Fridman’s long-form interviews with scientists, YouTube channels like 3Blue1Brown, SciShow, and Kurzgesagt have large audiences and treat viewers as intelligent adults.
These efforts, however, are islands. What is needed is a structural recommitment to science journalism, treating it as public infrastructure, like public libraries or primary education. This means more dedicated science beats in newsrooms, more open-access science publications that are not locked behind $30 paywalls, and more coverage in vernacular languages. Perhaps the Science Journalists Association of India (SJAI) and the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) could help.
We also need more science fiction, more science internships, more blogs, vlogs, Insta posts, and newsletters by scientists who can speak to ordinary audiences. The goal should be the democratisation of scientific literacy.
Frontline has tried, in a modest way, to hold this ground. For years, R. Ramachandran, one of India’s most accomplished science journalists whose work has ranged from covering CERN’s Higgs boson discovery to documenting the failures of India’s pandemic governance, has anchored our science column, The Science Notebook. He gives our readers a regular dose of careful, informed, critical science writing. You can read his pieces here. They are mostly free to read.
It’s only a candle. But as Faraday showed that Christmas in 1848, you can explain the whole world with a candle if you hold it up and look closely enough.
If you are a science lover and miss popular science writing, write to us. And let’s see how we can do more.
Wishing you a week of discoveries,
Jinoy Jose P.
Digital Editor, Frontline
We hope you’ve been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.in