CSF Op-Ed: Media I Am

How blogs, tweets, and social media are changing science writing.

Back in the dark ages, books were a luxury for the ultra-rich. When everything had to be copied by hand, written documents were rare, and therefore expensive. Then the printing press came along. Later, the paperback. Books became cheaper, easier to produce.

Once, writing in a public forum was a privilege. You needed permission, an editor’s stamp of approval, to publish anything from a news story to an op-ed piece. Today, anyone can have a platform. Putting your thoughts out into the public realm is becoming a basic right. Now, if only ideas could become cheaper, or easier to produce.

Everything’s changed, and yet nothing has changed.

Cambridge Carnival Day

Even in the midst of a thunderstorm, Saturday’s Science Carnival was spectacular.

With rows of booths and activities as far as the eye could see, the space surrounding the Cambridge Public Library was busy with experiments and energy. There was music, swing dancing, balloons and several tiny children wandering around fully clad in the Pfizer booth’s lab coats, goggles and plastic gloves.

A Night of Nerdery

Cambridge got a little nerdier on Friday night. 

At “Nerdnite Presents Nerdtacular!” a group of self-identified geeks gathered at the MIT Museum for some socializing and a trio of interesting lectures. Over cheap beer and cheese puffs, we alternately chatted and paid attention to the three guest speakers whose topics were perfectly suited to their largely awkward-intellectual grad student audience.

Probing life and learning

On Friday evening, a large crowd gathered at The Laboratory at Harvard for an exercise in fast-paced, big-time brilliance. At Big Ideas for Busy People, ten scientists each had the floor for five minutes to discuss their work’s significance. Five more minutes for questions followed each presentation, while a prominent countdown clock marshaled the time.

The ideas introduced by this group of Harvard and MIT researchers spanned topics as varied as multiverses and optigenetics. These engaging speakers dipped into the origins of life, the roadblocks of rote learning and the reason why we might be able to call our era the most peaceful of the human species’ existence.

Standing Up For Science

Last Tuesday, Sense about Science hosted a great discussion about the interactions between scientists and journalists.  Here are 10 tips for young scientists, based on the panel's wisdom.


SPEAKERS:
Leonor Sierra, Sense About Science
Karen Weintraub, freelance health and science journalist
Dr Chris Reddy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Morgan Thompson, Science in the News
B.D. Colen, Senior Communications Officer for University Science, Harvard University

Wonderful Webs

Charlotte made hers terrific, radiant and humble. With grace, she expended enormous amounts of energy to spin stunning webs. E.B. White introduced the wonders of spider webs to a general audience in his 1952 children’s novel, Charlotte’s Web. Charlotte was know for spinning elaborate patterns, presenting her piglet friend Wilbur’s admirable qualities in silky web words to convince farmers to spare this sensational pig from being slaughtered.

Big Ideas for Busy People: Sara Seager

(Photo by Fangfei Shen)

Sara Seager studies planets. Faraway planets. Very faraway planets. The planets Seager studies are exoplanets, planets that encircle stars other than our sun.

Seager, a Professor of Planetary Science and Professor of Physics at MIT, is one of the top experts in exoplanet science, a field that is currently brimming with excitement.

“The reason why we’re excited,” says Seager, “is because we think that this is a really huge thing. Hundreds and thousands of years from now, people will look back and ask, what are the significant accomplishments of our society in the early twenty-first century? One of them will be that we were the first to discover other worlds and other worlds that might be like Earth. When you think back four hundred years, what do you remember? You think about Christopher Columbus and Lewis and Clark. It’s the exploration—finding things that were new to our culture. And that’s why we’re excited.”

Climate Change and Martian Bones

In a virtual world called Arcadia, sifting through yards of Martian bones is all in a day’s work.

Chasing through leaves, over rivers and between red mountains, the goal is to find bone specimens, analyze them and figure out what tragedy happened in fictional Arcadia to leave so many scattered remains and no signs of life.

Launched in 2010, this game called Martian Boneyards is the brainchild of Cambridge-based Educational Gaming Environments group (EdGE). The gaming group is just one division at TERC, a larger non-profit organization that focuses on math and science education.

So how do Martian bones relate to science and math education? The game designers believe that some of the skills you need to succeed in Martian Boneyards—collecting evidence, analyzing data and drawing conclusions—are the same tools someone uses to succeed in science. The game is part of a larger massively-multiplayer online environment (MMO) called Blue Mars, and is built upon the types of investigations central to sciences like forensics and genetic engineering.