Last week was a busy week for science reporting. Along with a new pentaquark particle discovered at CERN, the New Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto. Nearly every major news organization had representatives at mission control, based at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, including Physics Today’s Paul Guinnessy. As part of his coverage, which broke a number of internal records, Guinnessy live tweeted to both Inside Science and Physics Today’s Twitter feeds. The Pluto posts to Physics Today’s Facebook page increased the magazine’s visibility by more than 3 million people, to a new weekly total of 6.4 million. A video showing the moment in the auditorium that the probe’s signal was regained by Earth was seen by 300,000 people and watched by more than 61,000 people. The posts on both platforms engaged scientists and the public into discussing, “What are we seeing on Pluto?” and “Why is the geology so young and the surface so distinct?” The most retweeted post, however, came to Physics Today from a picture snapped by the History Center’s Teasel Muir-Harmony, who noticed that one of the cars in the APL car park had a modified car sticker, “My other car (STRIKE is on its way) flew past Pluto.”
