Monthly Archives: November 2016

Science communication: A solution to the upcoming Brexit funding gap?

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Effective science communication could be key to making science part of the identity of the UK, says Naturejobs journalism competition winner Helen Robertson.

Post-Brexit furor is hard to avoid in the UK media at the moment. Endless speculation surrounds what looks to be a socioeconomic experiment on a national scale, and it goes without saying that the implications will be far-reaching across all UK industries.

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Leaving the EU has been projected to cost British science one billion rapidly-falling pounds a year

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The “black box” effect in science communication

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To counter sensationalist journalism and to bring the public closer to the realities of research, science communication must focus on the how and why of science, says Naturejobs journalism competition winner Lev Tankelevitch.

In July 2016 scientists found out how to map the brain into dozens of new areas using neuroimaging. We also discovered that thousands of such brain scanning studies may be flawed. To someone lacking insight into neuroscience, these two equally important studies can seem conflicting. Although “science communication” happens everywhere, science can still feel like a black box to the public, mysteriously churning out breakthroughs which are packaged and relayed by a barrage of tweets and headlines.

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Has big data changed what it means to be a scientist?

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Researchers still need to adhere to the scientific method, regardless of how large the datasets are or how complicated the experiments become.

Publishing better science through better data journalism competition winner Erica Brockmeier

The life of today’s scientific researcher doesn’t look like it did in the 1940s. One of the papers I cited in my dissertation, published in 1941 by Dr. C.L. Turner, describes the efforts of a solo scientist manually counting bone segments in female fish fins after treatment with anabolic steroids. Turner was one of the first scientists to show that female mosquitofish exposed to androgens exhibited the type of fin growth which was normally only found in male mosquitofish.

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{credit}QUINTIN ANDERSON{/credit}

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