Here’s a link to my Guardian environment article on the vote for the ugliest animal. I know it’s not space science news but it’s a little bit of fun.
I wrote this article following on from a press conference at The British Science Festival in Newcastle where the Ugly Animal Preservation Society announced the result of the global online vote. Turns out that the blobfish wins but it’s quite funny how many people are now defending this poor endangered species, it even has it’s own twitter page!
I’ll post links soon to the Guardian Science Weekly podcasts that I worked on. They should be out over the next few weeks…lots of interviews, it was fun. There’s even some space science in the some of the interviews!
Guardian Science podcast recording with Jason Phipps
Well this blog brings me nearly to then end of my week at the British Science Festival in Newcastle, and what a fantastic week it’s been. I’ve been immersed in the sights and sounds of so much varied science and had some great discussions on really quite a wide range of different science topics. I’ve been officially working for the Guardian whilst here as part of my British Science Association Media Fellowship and I think it’s rounded off a great experience that I’ve had in this role over the summer. I’d love to come back and do it all again next year…and the event will move to Birmingham so I may well go although whether it’s in the capacity as a scientist, journalist or science communicator I am not yet sure. The British Science Festival staff here have been amazing helping us to set up interviews and generally looking after us. I have so many highlights (one of them being a robot that delivered us beer) but I will just summarise here the work I did along with Jason Phipps from the Guardian putting together some podcast material for the Guardian Science Weekly.
The science we covered in the podcast interviews has been very varied to say the least and on one day I had to switch to three different subjects for different interviews within a 2 hour period. I learnt that preparation is key, as long as I’d done my planning and thinking beforehand around the general questions I wanted to ask, I found my brain switched with no trouble to each interview and the conversation, on the whole, flowed fairly well. I didn’t find it too scary and actually quite enjoyed sitting in the presenter/interviewer seat for a change.
Do cosmetics really help our skin?
I kicked off my first podcast by interviewing Prof Desmond Tobin after I saw his talk about the ‘Science of Cosmetics’. He gave a really interesting insight into how the skin reacts to different beauty creams and whether it’s worth paying £650 for a pot of anti-aging cream. I think the conclusion was that we aren’t really sure but that some ‘real’ science does indeed go into the production of many beauty products. However, it might be hard for the public to work out which products had actually proven their ingredients worked, and unless an independent lab had tested the product then we couldn’t be sure. He mentioned about the use of nanoparticles in products and this is a field that is not very well understood at present (they only recently defined the term ‘nano’ in this area to mean particles as less than 40nm because these are small enough to actually enter into the skin). It seems that so little is understood about nano-sized particles that it might be better to avoid them for now. But in a largely unregulated industry the consumer may have no idea that the product they are buying contains these ingredients as companies do not need to say on the packet!
The Sun (the celestial object, not the newspaper, they aren’t reporting from the festival this week).
I also interviewed a physicist, Dr James McLaughlin, about his research on the sun and this was following on from a presentation he gave in Newcastle Central Library. Despite being a space scientist myself I found that there was lots I didn’t know about the sun, especially that if you were an astronaut in space and a solar flare came your way that it could kill you instantly. Interesting thoughts for the 200,000 people that have put themselves forward for a potential mission to Mars. At this same library event a second presentation was given by a musician who had done some really fun work of capturing the sounds of the Solar System. I heard a pulsar and the Cassini spacecraft travelling around Saturn. This was really fascinating stuff.
Reproductive health, how long can women leave it before considering having children?
I really enjoyed speaking to Prof Mary Herbert about the aging of reproductive eggs. Her rather stark warning to women was to have children young – meaning early 20’s – as reproductive health really drops off after 35. Rather sobering but potentially not very helpful advice. The press conference highlighted the fact that many women are simply not ‘choosing’ to leave it so late to have children because it is a complicated issue and there are many other factors involved in these decisions. We discussed on the podcast what could be done about this prevalence for older mothers and she suggested that we needed a total change in social and political circles to allow career-driven women, and others, to have children younger and still maintain a solid career path. But perhaps this is a much bigger debate than I have time to give it here so we’ll move on.
Designer Vaginas: Centrefold project
And we’ve moved on to a fairly controversial event. I’m so glad I went along, on a bit of a whim, to this film and debate because I learnt an awful lot about this topic. I had no idea that labioplasty surgery was so prevalent (around 2000 operations on the NHS in the last 2 years). The event I went to was an animated film about three women who had surgery and it was followed by a debate around the subject. I plan to write a longer blog piece about this because it really deserves some space but we got to speak to the film producer, Ellie Land, and one of the doctors, Lih-Mei Liao, involved in the film about this subject for the podcast. Despite the early start we had to make because the doctor was due back in London for her clinic, we had a great discussion. Both the women were really inspiring and I’m sure we could’ve chatted about the topic all day had we the opportunity. Here’s the link to the wider Centrefold Project where the movie is available for free. It’s fantastic and really thought provoking so I suggest you take a look (but it might not be for very young children).
So many other highlights but too much to cover here. I suggest that if you’re interested then sign up for some talks at next year’s festival. Anyway, I’ll be a little sad to leave the press office this week but its back to the science for me now.
Getting excited for my trip up north to Newcastle for the British Science Festival that starts this weekend and runs all of next week. I’ll be going as an ‘undercover scientist’ as I’m attending in my role as Guardian journalist instead. I’ll be looking out for interesting new science to cover as news stories and attending the daily press conferences. I’ve got tickets for some of the talks too, with some famous names!
I’m also really looking forward to catching up with all the other Media Fellows from the 2013 batch as there will all be attending too. We can compare our experiences of the world of journalism. I’ll report back in a few weeks.
Well it’s been an exciting few days, and all thanks to the Perseids meteor shower from the Comet Swift-Tuttle. I only managed a brief look last night because I had to be up early to appear on Sky Sunrise to talk about the event. Unfortunately, through no fault of my own, I missed the slot because the taxi took sooo long to get to the studio. Such a shame. However, straight after I was due to talk about the Perseids on the BBC News Channel and I made this slot with time to spare, and time for a much needed cup of tea too. It was really fun to try out the new studio in Portland Place (the last time I was on the BBC News Channel it was still in the old BBC building just before they moved over), and the presenter Simon McCoy was really funny in between filming which relaxed me a bit. Anyway, it’s not all over for the meteors, I’ll try to catch some tonight…cloud looks to be clearing again so fingers crossed. And if not, there’s always next year, or November for the Leonids.
Anyway, if you missed it all then click here for some beautiful pictures of the Perseids taken by others and published in The Independent.
Last week I gave a talk to the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) about ‘Sampling the mysteries of the space by sample return of comets and asteroids’. The BIS are based in London and the turnout for the talk was good. There were lots of questions from the audience after my talk and this continued in the pub afterwards so was lots of fun. I’ll post a link to the BIS write-up from the talk on here when it’s available but I highly recommend joining the BIS if you want to learn more about various space-related topics. They have regular talks and are a really interesting bunch of people.
It’s been a busy and varied few weeks on my placement, as you’ll see from the links below to the various articles I worked on. I was really pleased that some of them ended up in the print version too. I’ve also enjoyed reading the comments on the articles on the online versions as some of them are really funny, particularly the idea that primitive proto-hamsters took over Mars, not something I’d considered, obviously.
I can’t believe it’s nearly all over now. I’ve got only 1 day left. But I hope to think of this as the beginning of a new side to my science life which will involve some more writing with my newly gained knowledge about this small part of the media world. Back to the lab first thing next week, the only writing I’ll be doing there is notes in the lab book – still just as important!
Here’s my articles from the last few weeks:
Acute oak decline, a version of this also ended up in the print version.
Heatwave affecting wildlife, after my visit to the RSPB HQ at The Lodge, Sandy, Bedfordshire. A small section of this ended up in the print version on 20th July 2013.
It’s been another busy week on my British Science Association Media Fellowship. I can’t believe I’m halfway through now, it’s going so quickly. I’ve spoken to lots of different scientists and specialists to get the inside story and at one point I was working on three stories almost simultaneously, which was rather taxing on the brain. However, I’m really enjoying the challenge of getting my head around so many new topics and then having to write an article in a really short timescale that’s (hopefully) interesting. This is certainly a different pace to academic writing. If only I could pump out scientific papers at this rate.
I also learnt about The Guardian’s ‘style’ this week in relation to the use of acronyms in one of my articles. For The Guardian, apparently if you can say the acronym as a word then they do not capitalise it (e.g. BECCS becomes Beccs in my article about reversing global warming (see above) but CCS remains as CCS). Here’s the rest of their extensive guide. I wouldn’t read it all at once but it’s a useful reference.
So today the new Guardian Science podcast came out. These are presented by Alok Jha of the Guardian and cover a different science topic each week, appearing online every Monday. This week’s one that I was involved in covers the Royal Society Summer Exhibition. My input comes towards the end of podcast where I got my first experience in interviewing. I think I found it harder than being interviewed myself. I was helped by the fact that my first interview was with Geraint Jones who did my Guardian placement last summer, and is a scientist based at UCL.
Guardian building London – my office for the month
Scientist one month, journalist the next. Here I am working at the very posh Guardian office in London. Don’t worry, I’ll be back to science research again next month but here’s a quick update for what I’ve been up to during my first week on placement as a British Science Association Media Fellow at the Guardian.
I had my first article published on the Guardian Environment site about radiocarbon dating of illegal ivory by and my first blog piece too about Prince Charles mending his suit and more specifically about consumerism for clothing. I also went this week to my first press conference (as a scientist or journalist) which was a real insight into what journalists look for when reporting science stories.
I spent Wednesday morning at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition with the Guardian podcast people Alok and Jason. We recorded lots of interviews for next weeks podcast so I’ll provide a link when it’s ready. Exhibition was so much fun too and I got to talk to ‘real’ scientists, only sometimes giving away my undercover status! Even got to lift up Chris Hoy’s very light Olympic gold-medal winning bike, no wonder those guys go so fast!
I’m giving a talk next month (July 31st) to the The British Interplanetary Society in London entitled ‘Sampling the mysteries of space by sample return of comets and asteroids’. Click here for more details.
