Comments?

The magazine Popular Science dates back to 1872. It’s older than Nature (1879), Science (1880), and American Scientist (1913). It was originally an academic journal, before it split into two parts, with the academic portion eventually being absorbed into Science. It’s high quality scientific journalism for a broad audience.

So I was interested to read their explanation for the most recent change to their website:

Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.

tl;dr: Comments can be bad for science? The operative word is “can”, and they back up their decision. Essentially they argue that people are impressionable (and anti-science is a problem), and since the magazine cannot ensure balance in comments, they’ll just go without and let the discussions play out on other online forums.

For the forseeable future, Labrigger will keep comments on.