Artist's rendering of Spirit; Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech
This morning, the NY Times had a story that didn’t sound particularly optimistic. But this afternoon, the rover team made the official announcement.
Spirit might still have interesting science to report. And, oh, yeah, Opportunity is still driving.
Spirit rover's wheels move a little; Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Back to my favorite space topic– the Spirit rover. I’m fascinated by the meticulous science and engineering effort going into an obvious obstacle: a robot stuck in the sand. The only problem? The robot and the sand are millions of miles away.
So far, even though it’s been 8 months, Spirit’s still stuck. But scientists have built animations of how the robot got stuck. They’re working with a model and similar conditions on Earth to figure out how to get Spirit rolling again. [Check out NASA's video.] At the same time, they note, the nearby soil is rich with minerals that could indicate a watery early Martian history. So in some ways, being stuck is “like your car breaking down at Disneyland.”
But as a science communicator, I’m also glad to highlight the process of science and engineering before we know the outcome. When we tell these problem-solving stories, it’s often in hindsight. New discoveries typically involve years of hard work and months– sometimes years– to finish various steps along the way.
Ultimately, patience and problem-solving often go hand-in-hand.
Keep tabs on Spirit’s progress through NASA’s Free Spirit page.
influenza virus particle: CDC Public Health image library, Credit: Cynthia Goldsmith; Content Providers: CDC/ Dr. Erskine. L. Palmer; Dr. M. L. Martin
Though my writing life ranges from writing health stories for teens to writing about research topics and careers issues for scientists, the sources that I speak with for the former type of article generally don’t overlap with those for the latter. Until now.
Last spring, I was working on an article about the common cold, and I asked a group of writer buddies: do you know a virologist who could talk about the common cold? I need someone who can leave out the jargon– someone who’s the best of what we all look for in an interview. The recommendation– Ben tenOever– a researcher who actually works on influenza viruses at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. But he gave me a great interview– explaining viruses, how they work in terms that teens could understand. My favorite analogy that didn’t make it into the story: “If you consider the Empire State Building to be the size average cell in the nose, the virus would be the size of a fist.” The resulting story was published in December– in Weekly Reader’s Current Health 2. [sorry, it's not available online]
But Ben’s also a young scientist on the rise– studying both how the immune system responds to viral infection and a new bioengineering strategy for developing flu vaccines– more on that in my most recent article for Science Careers. Talking with him, particularly in person, I noticed his enthusiasm, about science in general, viruses, and his own research projects. Science is a tough business, but it’s clear from talking with him how much he loves the hunt for new discoveries– combing through new data and figuring out what it means.
It’s incredibly rare that I find a scientist who is so good at tuning his descriptions and who also effuses energy and enthusiasm with every analogy or anecdote. What fun that I get to tell their stories.
seasonal glow
iStockphoto/ShyMan
I prefer my seaweed applewood smoked. However, truthfully, before yesterday, I’m not sure I could have told you whether I liked seaweed, smoked or otherwise.
I do like sushi, but the seaweed within a maki roll has always seemed more functional than flavorful– a necessary material to keep the whole thing held together.
But when I heard about yesterday’s Experimental Cuisine Collective meeting– “The Science of Sushi and Seaweed”– I couldn’t resist. The speaker’s day job is as a biophysicist at a Danish university, and he haunts sushi restaurants (and even writes a book) in his spare time. Perfect.
And so I spent yesterday afternoon at a sushi science talk and algae tasting. Seaweeds are algae after all, not plants. So though many algae synthesize food from the sun, unlike plants, seaweeds are complexes of single cells. Plants are interdependent multicellular organisms– seaweed are communities of independent operators.
Ole Mouritsen talked in a lovely cultural and scientific hodgepodge– part cultural history and part science. The flavors of sushi– the sweetness of the rice, the sour from the vinegar– date back to old methods for preserving fish. Though no longer necessary, those lingering elements of taste are part of the sushi experience. A tidbit about wasabi– though it may be fiery– its punch comes from isothiocyanates (funky molecular structures that have carbon, nitrogen and sulfur lined up next to each other). But unlike other molecules that set our taste buds on fire (capsaicin in chili peppers, for example), isothiocyanates are water soluble. That’s why you can actually cleanse your palate pretty easily if you get a little too much of the evil green stuff.
But back to the seaweed. I’m definitely not ready to become an algaetarian, but seaweed definitely makes an interesting, sometimes pungent garnish. Nori– the ubiquitous sushi wrapping– is actually paper-like, easily torn. But when wrapped around sushi rice, it quickly absorbs water and the complex sugars become gummy. The Japanese annually fete Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, the British botanist who figured out how to culture this particular algae.
Oboro kombu looks a little like vacuum cleaner lint and melts in your mouth like umami cotton candy. And then there’s the dulse– dark red, tangy, particularly the almost bacony applewood-smoked version. Don’t forget to sniff first.
I get to talk about an interesting application of carbon dioxide today in my latest article for Scientific American: sterilizing transplanted tissues such as tendon and bone. Before I heard about this technology, I certainly wouldn’t have suspected that the ubiquitous gas that we exhale could become a super-scrubber with a little heat and a lot of pressure.
I’ve ended up playing with a lot of carbon dioxide over the years. Like most kids, I had ghoulish carbon dioxide bubbles from dry ice that fizzed my Halloween drinks. As a chemist, dry ice became almost too “normal.” As an undergrad, I made my own bricks of the stuff from a tank of compressed CO2, and in graduate school, I’d weigh it out by the tens, if not hundreds, of pounds. Mostly, I used it to cool things down.
But though it’s easy as a working organic chemist to think it cliché, watching the supercritical fluid form and dissipate is amazing. That sense of wonder within a high pressure chamber– and the practical applications that come from it– keep me coming back to work everyday.
Speaking of clichés, this professor probably fits the stereotypical scientist image a little too well. But I love his giddy enthusiasm when he talks about how he uses the demonstration to see whether a prospective student might be a good fit for his research group.
tryptophan structure via Wikimedia Commons
Though the tryptophan rush from turkey is more hype than reality, Thanksgiving is the perfect time to put up the most structurally complex of the amino acids, tryptophan.
The body uses it to make serotonin, and biochemists use its absorbance of ultraviolet light to determine concentrations of proteins in their samples.
Today I’m thinking that it’s much more esthetically interesting than most of its amino-acid pals, at least the naturally-occurring ones.
Happy Thanksgiving!
My scientific world is probably best defined as medium-to-small. Because there’s usually a tie-in to a molecule, my conceptual world operates somewhere between the slightly sub-nanometer to human sizes of meters and kilometers. Except for my occasional forays into astronomy, I don’t often stretch my mind to light-years or cram it down to subatomic particles. But even then I’m often writing about the chemical stuff in cosmic clouds or the composition of Mars dust. But even the molecular world is maddening when trying to talk about size.
Science writers– particularly when we delve into the abstract– depend on reliable size comparisons. We can spend hours trying to come up with an appropriate size analogy as we desperately dodge cliches.
But the internet is wonderful, and I’m continually amazed by its power to illustrate. Yesterday, via Amy Rice Doetsch, a science educator friend, I found out about this amazing web resource that bridges the wilds of biological sizes from coffee bean to carbon atom. In this case, a very slick set of graphics provide the equivalent of paragraphs of size perspective.
Then I went looking for even broader comparisons, and found this one– not quite as graphically refined– but one that goes all the way from cosmos to quark. I’d love to hear of other examples. In the meantime, enjoy!
Pick up a passport, and travel along an ancient road with silk, haunting melodies and the simmering whiff of oils and spices.
At its best, the American Museum of Natural History’s Traveling the Silk Road exhibition evokes as many senses as possible, particularly smell and sound. There’s a wonderful market where you can test your abilities to match smells, and, as a bonus, we also heard music by musicians involved in Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project (performing on Sundays at the museum).
I just found myself wishing that there were a few more things that I was allowed to touch, particularly with beautiful silks, looms and a video demonstrating how weavers transform worm cocoons into stunning garments. I heard of at least a couple ancient trading posts that I’d never read about, hubs where ancient roads met for the exchange of all kinds of goods and information.
This trading network was the information superhighway of its time– 600 to 800 AD– exchanging science, culture, design patterns. I was enthralled with the water clock and fiddled for a while with the astrolabe, attempting to tell time from the night sky. I gained a whole new respect for ancient sailors– the number of steps it took just to find out where and “when” they were.
I’ve recently rekindled an interest in ceramics, so I spent a lot of time contemplating classic curves and forms of the various pots and vessels– beautiful, functional, ancient and, yet, somehow modern, too. The exhibit was a wonderful experience in seeing connections between past cultures and my daily connections to a distant past.
Last Friday afternoon, I spoke on a panel about media careers for the “What Can You Be With A Ph.D.?” Symposium held at NYU Langone Medical Center. I talked to several students and postdocs after the program and wanted to pull together a list of resources related to careers in science writing.
It was a fun session– I learned a lot from my co-panelists and the auditorium was full of people with a lot of interesting questions about careers that blend science and communications– including journal publishing, medical communications, medical science liaisons (MSL– a career, incidentally, that I didn’t know anything about until Friday), and yours truly, who talked about my mix of freelance science writing experiences. The overall symposium program looked terrific– I wish that I’d had access to a careers program of this size and quality when I was a graduate student.
But back to science writing:
- First off, my general advice for navigating the migration from Ph.D. scientist to science writer, from an earlier blog post on Webb of Science.
- National Association of Science Writers (NASW): You can become a student member. Going to a national meeting and networking among other writers helped me figure out how to navigate my career change from chemistry to science writing
- Science Writers in New York (SWINY): The regional affiliate of NASW– a great opportunity to meet local writers and find out about local science.
- A book: the recently-updated, A Field Guide for Science Writers.
- An internship program especially for scientists: AAAS Mass Media Fellowship
I also got a few questions (after the main session) about freelancing. A few thoughts:
- It’s not a good fit for everyone. You’re starting a business, so you have to think about all the issues (and potential insecurities) that go with that: finding health insurance, start-up costs, lack of a retirement plan, etc.
- Getting started is hard work, and it will probably take a while to prove yourself. Persistence is key: continue to pursue opportunities, get experience where you can, and build your clip file.
- It is possible to start a freelance business even if you don’t have a huge cushion of savings (I didn’t). Think about practical strategies that will allow you to start slowly. Having some source of steady income while you ramp up is essential if you don’t have a nest-egg to fall back on.
UPDATE NOVEMBER 23: For NYC-area scientists interested in learning more about the transition from the bench to a writing career, Science Writers in New York has a program on December 1: Goodbye Benchtop; Hello Laptop.
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Share on Facebook
