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Scientific illustration as an independent genre represents the specifics of the concept of "scientific" that has developed over three centuries of the development of the scientific method of European classical natural science. The basic characteristics of the scientific method and its private tools (including illustrations) are impartial, non-judgmental, non-subjective, emotionless modeling of the objects being studied and depicted. Illustrated popular science publications for children, as a tool of non-formal education with a supposed dual addressing, find themselves on the boundary line between scientific and educational illustrations. The complexity of the format is that it must be scientific, children educational, entertaining and popular at the same time. In handdrawn illustrations for such books, two very different ways of presenting the material can be distinguished. The article discusses the status of illustrations in terms of the possibility of classifying them as scientific in a children's guidebook, made in a sketchy manner.

A personal essay on the author's transition from editor of Popular Science magazine to science reporter for Al Jazeera America, the television channel. He finds that the new role—and good science reporting generally—provides a lens through which to see most major news stories dominating the headlines in a clear, thoughtful, and unbiased way.

Abstract
This essay examines the life and career of famed Russian geologist, geographer, and academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences V. A. Obruchev. By emphasizing Obruchev's commitment to popular enlightenment within and beyond his scientific disciplines, a clearer portrait of Obruchev's lasting influence in Soviet science and literature emerges. Over the course of his career, Obruchev devised an original model of public science, one that renegotiated the traditional boundaries between science fiction, popular science, and academic discourse. As a result, Obruchev's scientific research granted form and function to his popular fiction and his fiction, in turn, provided a space to explore the possibilities of scientific hypotheses and promote the active research of the scientific phenomena Obruchev considered significant. By the time of Obruchev's death in 1956, other natural scientists, especially geoscientists, and science fiction authors had coopted Obruchev's approach to popular enlightenment, cementing his legacy.

This paper explores the phenomena of public scientific debates, where scientific controversies are argued out in public fora such as the mass media, using the case of popular evolutionary psychology in the UK of the 1990s. An earlier quantitative analysis of the UK press coverage of the subject (Cassidy, 2005) suggested that academics associated with evolutionary psychology had been unusually active in the media at that time, particularly in association with the publication of popular science books on the subject. Previous research by Turner, by Gieryn, and by Bucchi has established the relationship between such appeals to the public domain and the establishment of scientific legitimacy and academic disciplinary boundaries. Following this work, I argue here that popular science has, in this case, provided a creative space for scientists, outside of the constraints of ordinary academic discourse, allowing them to reach across scientific boundaries in order to claim expertise in the study of human beings.