Would you snorkel in near freezing rivers to study salmon? This guy would - for 2500 miles! Full disclosure, I’m working with the inspiring company Leaping Frog Films that created this film, and they are looking for sponsorship for this series.
Did you know that even though your taxes pay for scientific research, you usually can’t see the results without paying huge fees? Free access publicly funded science will increase the speed of science, create jobs, and save lives.
HT @Comprendia
gene|fish: oysters, urbanization, and crowdfunding - oh my!
I’m sure almost everyone has heard of crowdfunding for research dollars at this point, and maybe you are even intrigued by the concept. Well, two of us SAFS-ites (Lauren in the Olden Lab and Emma in the Roberts Lab) are out on the crowdfunding limb this month as part of the second #SciFund…
What IS ocean acidification anyway? A simple explanation. HT @aseachange
I’m not ashamed to admit that I LOVE the band They Might Be Giants. Some might think, at first listen, that this is a band for kids. But, as my boyfriend so aptly put it “a wannabe punk rocker and a wannabe lounge singer got together and this is what happened”. Their album Here Comes Science is a treasure to science geeks like me, and might even have you singing phrases like “The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma” nearly unaware that you are actually learning and loving science.
This song itself is an example of the iterative nature of the process of science - a fancy way of saying “science circles back on itself so that useful ideas are built upon and used to learn even more about the natural world.” The TMBG song is actually a cover of a song from the 1950’s that goes “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas”. Though catchy, this is actually incorrect. The scientific consensus has evolved to include even more types of matter than just the solids, liquids, and gases, like many of us learned in grade school. TMBG originally covered the song to include the incorrect lyrics. After learning that the sun is actually made of a type of matter known as plasma, they re-wrote the entire thing. Hear the story from John and John themselves in their interview on NPR.
Did you know that 4 leaf clovers are rare because 4 is not a fibonacci number? Learn more about fibonacci numbers in nature in this video by @numberphile HT @GrrlScientist
Science Online Seattle Livestream
If you can’t make it to the event, watch on livestream or follow the twitter hashtag #soSEA
Where Are The Science Communicators? Interactive Map of 1000+ #SciComm Twitterers
Happy to see Seattle and some tweeps of mine make it on this map of where the people using the #SciComm hashtag are located, including @UW_CoEnv, @LizNeely, and @Hickeyh
MY LIFE
(Source: genefish)
I’m a big fan of science communication projects that experiment with different forms of media - here’s a pop song about chemistry!
While this might get a chuckle out of science geeks like myself, I wonder how much it can really communicate about science. If you are really listening closely, you can glean some info about electrons and atoms, but do you really learn much? Maybe this is the price you must pay to reach a wider audience: while a blog post might teach quite a bit about science, you will only reach those who want to read about science online (I imagine that market is rather small). On the other hand, nearly everybody on the internet likes to watch a clever video for a couple of minutes.
Science communicators, what are your thoughts on using different types of media? What are the ups and downs of each in your experience? Do you have a favorite?
