Plant blindness refers to the inability to see or notice plants in one’s environment, and inability to recognize the importance of plants to the whole biosphere and to human affairs. Plant blindness has become an obstacle of public understanding of plant-based science and engagement in biodiversity conservation. This article reviews the relevant literature regarding plant blindness to explore why this phenomenon occurs and how we can overcome it. It finds that plant blindness is shaped by physiological, educational and cultural features of human being, and the result of the loss of traditional culture as well. It is proved that promoting public’s involvement in building community gardens, innovating plant-based science pedagogy, implementing new techniques in communicating plants, and keeping plants as foreground in urban design are effective approaches to solve the issues caused by the plant blindness. In order to further enhance the plant-based science communication in China, we argue that more empirical studies on plant blindness are needed. Moreover, we should pay attention to the positive role of Chinese traditional culture in public’s understanding of plants, the role that botanical gardens played in science communication. Last but not least, plant blindness could be addressed by the increasing nature education trend, which needs more support from the government.

The benchmark of civic scientific literacy embodies great influence for improving the quality of civic scientific literacy, guiding the development of popular science activities, and building an innovation-oriented country. Currently, American scientific literacy benchmark has been studied by many scholars, while the reference value of Japanese scientific literacy benchmark has been neglected. Wisdom of Science and Technology Comprehensive Report is taken as the research object in this paper. It mainly using text analysis and inductive research methods. The results show that the Japanese civic scientific literacy benchmark includes such excellent ideas as integrating into the national cultural tradition, integrating knowledge across fields, and paying attention to the long-term implementation of the benchmark. Finally, it gives some advice on the construction of Chinese civic scientific literacy.

SWOT analysis method is used to analyze the opportunities and challenges brought by the current internal and external environment to the science popularization of university museums in China. It suggests that the university museums have strengths in collection resources, scientific research strength, talent team and local science popularization resources, and weaknesses in lack of popularization of scientific research achievements, perfect volunteer team and management system. At the same time, university museums are facing the impact of popular science media, adverse impact of public opinion environment and other challenges. For this purpose, this paper puts forward the development strategy matrix of science popularization work in university museums and provides a new development idea for the further improvement of comprehensive science popularization ability of university museums.

This research took SARS and COVID-19 as cases, with digital interactive services “2-3-6” model as framework, summarized the new elements, new platforms, and new forms of science popularization in the media convergence environment. Under the background of technology leading media convergence, this paper put forward the emergency transformation happened on the science popularization in three dimensions, namely the transformation of information from the multiple breakpoints to the “live broadcast” at the whole process, the transformation of media from single channel to holographic real reproduction, and the transformation of audience from passive reception to interactive participation, and to provided reference for the construction and innovative practice of emergency popularization mode under the media convergence environment.

Science camp is one of the important science activities for young students besides formal school education. This paper takes Youth College Science Camp in 2019 as an example to explore the effect of extracurricular science camp activities on students’ science interest. An ergodic questionnaire survey was conducted with a large sampling (n=11980). The result shows that Youth College Science Camp has a positive influence on the development of students’ science interest, perceptions of interest in science as well as on their tendency of choosing majors. It also has a good promotion effect on attracting young people to enter the scientific community and engage in scientific careers.

The paper investigates the communication practice of China’s first illustrated science popularization magazine Science Pictorial, and explores the role of Science Pictorial in the process of science popularization in modern China. The study found that pictorial magazines had been playing an enlightening role since they had been introduced into China, which laid a solid foundation for Science Pictorial to undertake the task of science popularization. Science Pictorial possessed many advantages over other science popularization media of the time that enabled it to cover much more audiences. Specifically, Science Pictorial was excellent in both illustration and text, and its language style, fit for knowledge, news reporting and entertainment, served well as a science popularization media. This study concludes that the communication practice of Science Pictorial in the Republic of China brought science from the scientific community to the people and contributed to the popularization of science. The communication research of Science Pictorial has referential significance for science popularization in the new media era.

With the rapid development of network information technology, the channels for the public to obtain scientific knowledge have changed. Short video platforms represented by Tik Tok are playing an increasingly important role in science popularization. There are huge differences among the communication effects of various science popularization short videos on Tik Tok. Therefore, it’s meaningful to introduce “communication capacity” as an index to measure video’s communication effect and investigate the influencing factors. This paper quantifies the communication capacity based on the entropy method. 100 science popularization short videos ranking at the top on Tik Tok between November 1st 2019 and Feburary 1st 2020 were examined to find their common characteristics of high communication capacity. In the light of characteristics of top science popularization videos, it is recommended to produce high-quality content adapted to target platform, develop personalized science popularization accounts and increase user engagement.