How Medium writers communicate science

Think of it as your Science Medium 101 course. (Issue #443)

Base Image: Katherine Dexter McCormick and other students at MIT circa 1890s, via MIT Museum/Wikimedia Commons

Science is one of the most direct ways we deepen our understanding of the world, but it can sometimes feel opaque to the non-scientists among us. There’s a thriving community of writers, publications, labs, and researchers on Medium taking science out of the peer-reviewed papers and hyped headlines and into the lives of real readers.

In this issue, we take inventory of three ways the Medium community is effectively communicating STEM news and educating readers on science and math topics. Think of this issue as your Science Medium 101.

Math is better than anything else at taking complex, sprawling ideas and boiling them down into their most fundamental form.

— Cole Frederick in Science Spectrum, This Theorem Is So Obvious It Feels Like Cheating

Publication foundation

We can start with the science publications. Think of these as the Medium community’s answers to science magazines, like Popular Science or National Geographic — full of in-depth reporting that bring studies to a wider audience.

The Quantastic Journal, for example, is one of the most popular science publications on the site. It paints with a broad brush, focusing on the entire STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) umbrella. “Our real commitment is to illuminate advancements and foster a community eager to understand STEM,” writes editor Sam Vaseghi, “and discuss its implications on humanity.” Recent stories include a look at “the tiny white grain that runs the world,” a look at statistical watermarking inspired by the recent Anthropic announcement, and ways to avoid tick bites.

The Academic, meanwhile, was launched by Rui Alves in January 2025, frames itself as a home for peer-reviewed stories. An academic from the University of Porto, he created the publication directly in response to a call for more university-caliber writing on the site — from a response to the controversy around a new anthropology study to vocal mimicry in parrots.

There are publications for nearly every discipline. Paleopress focuses on “old things” like pterosaurs or ancient Polynesians; AI Advances discusses the latest models; The Microscope takes a closer look at health and medicine. Even labs and companies — like the United Kingdom government’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, the data and AI team at Microsoft, or the student-run Data Science Society at UC Berkeley — are sharing their findings through publications.

But these publications are only the tip of the science iceberg.

By all accounts, these two young girls are shaking up the majority male math establishment. This is just an awesome turn of events and one which should inspire anyone — no matter what their background — that excellence in your chosen field of study is always attainable if you have enough joy and passion for what you do.

— Keith McNulty, A New Proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem Discovered By Two Teenagers

Explanation nation

There are also a number of Medium writers who go beyond reporting and into explaining. Think of these writers as being in the same family as the pop science stars like Bill Nye or Carl Sagan — science communicators who specialize in making concepts accessible to non-scientific audiences.

Ethan Siegel of Starts With a Bang! is an expert in this. Starts With a Bang! is a publication focused on space and the universe, but alongside the straight news reporting is a column called Ask Ethan where he answers questions about astronomy and physics. One recent column asked, “Why are astronauts weightless while still in Earth’s gravity?” While, as he writes, “this simple-sounding question is actually quite profound” and the answer has a lot to do with relationship between weight and acceleration, he goes into deep detail about why we may feel weightlessness in our everyday lives:

There’s a feeling we associate with that weightlessness: the feeling of your stomach rising up into your chest, bringing a wave of nausea and discomfort, often akin to the “butterflies in your stomach” feeling. You don’t just feel it when you fall or jump, but also when you ride a roller coaster, when you ride in a car that moves too quickly over a crest in an uneven road, or — as shown above — when you’re a passenger in a plane that suddenly cuts its engines, and enters into “free fall” for several seconds. NASA’s astronaut trainer aircraft, colloquially known as the vomit comet, does exactly this.

There’s a physiological reason for this. When you’re at rest on the ground, whether sitting, standing, or reclining, gravity pulls down not just on your body, but on all of your organs within your body.

Hemanth of Street Science takes a similar tact. While Starts With A Bang! mixes explainers with news and podcasts, Street Science is entirely focused on explaining core concepts with self-drawn illustrations, aimed at a lay audience. An article on the three-body problem (the physics concept, not the sci-fi novel and tv series named after it) goes through the history of the concept while explaining it. Another explains the concept of scale by starting with a very human question — “Do you want the little toy or the big toy?” — before expanding it beyond human understanding through the sounds, cosmology, and even financial ends that we can’t parse as individual humans.

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By breaking down these concepts into understandable explainers, the writers in this category are doing more than just introducing science to the masses — they’re making it easier to understand.

What if there’s another side to the story? That under certain conditions, stress enhances immune function rather than suppressing it?

— Stephanie Jyet Quan Loo in The Microscope, Does Stress “Weaken” Your Immune System? — Yes And No

Scientific storytelling

For writer and editor Martina H, whose writing appears in places like The Quantastic Journal and Southern Winds, it’s about weaving narrative storytelling with real science. She infuses her stories with elements of creative essays to reach (and teach) readers about topics like a drought in Sweden and increasingly chaotic winter weather.

One example: What Actually Happens When Solar Activity Increases? sounds like an explainer story about a solar storm which caused the aurora borealis to be visible much further south than normal. The story, however, is about a domestic storm as much as a solar one:

I pocket the phone and watch Cato. Forecasting these storms is still an exercise in humility. We can see eruptions leaving the Sun. We can estimate their speed. But until they sweep past satellites stationed between Earth and star, their arrival time remains uncertain, sometimes off by hours. Even now, with models and monitors and warnings, we live with a two-to-three-day window of anticipation, waiting to see how the invisible will arrange itself around us.

What stays with me is not the scale of it, or the numbers, or the history. It’s the thought that while I stood under the lights, convinced my world had narrowed to a single room and a single argument, something vast and volatile was already in motion, crossing space at impossible speed, bending fields, nudging systems.

Just reminding me how porous we are.

By linking these very human stories directly to science, she is taking something that can seem abstract and far away — a solar flare, an upcoming warm water mass — and bringing it into our lives. That is the essence of science communication, and the essence of what Science Medium is all about.

A final thought

The family of country music legend Dolly Parton announced that she passed away on August 25, 2026. She was a beloved icon not just because of her illustrious songwriting career — her hits include Jolene, I Will Always Love You (both of which were written on the same day!), 9 to 5, and Here You Go Again, among many, many others — but because of her dedication to helping other people.

One of her initiatives, which writer Kim Fedyk points out was “the one thing Dolly was most proud of,” is the Imagination Library. This program provides one free book a month to registered children from ages zero to five to inspire a lifelong love of reading. The program was a success — even after just 10 books, children in the program were four times more likely to read, per a study by Dr Claire Galea.

In a 2004 speech, Parton said:

The kids started calling me the ‘book lady,’ and Daddy was more proud of that than he was that I was a star.

This week, we challenge you to become the book lady (or however you identify) and inspire a love of reading in the people around you — in whatever form that takes.

From friends of the newsletter

Reed Hastings shook business models from Blockbuster Video to Hollywood studios in his 29 years at Netflix. He joins The CEO Signal, hosted by Penny Pritzker and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, to discuss how AI could unleash a new wave of “creative destruction” and why companies should not operate like families and more like “championship sports teams.” Watch now.

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Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

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