(Originally posted at http://joelnoche.multiply.com/journal/item/71/Science-magazines on September 16, 2011 10:25 AM)
There are a lot of magazines that aim to popularize science—American Scientist, Discover, Discovery Channel Magazine, New Scientist, Popular Science, Science News, Scientific American, Seed, The Sciences, and so on. My personal favorites are the issues of Scientific American from the 1970s and 1980s, the early 1990s issues of Discover, and Seed. (American Scientist and New Scientist are also quite good.) Scientific American was first published in 1845, Discover was first published in 1980, and Seed was first published in 2001 (but, sadly, its last print issue was published in 2009).
Note that two of the magazines in the above list don’t have any links. The Sciences and Discovery Channel Magazine are defunct. This is a real pity as both were quite good. The Sciences was published by the New York Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 2001. Discovery Channel Magazine was launched in February 2008 and ended publication in January 2011.