1818 AusTRAlIAN QuAusTRAlIAN QuARTeRlARTeRlY Y OCT–DEC 2017OCT–DEC 2017BETWEEn ThE CrACks
Science and SciComm with
iMAGE: © Robert Friedrich stieler (1847–1908)s
o we can hardly blame
non-scientists for getting
a little bit confused
when this mountain of
data is cherry-picked,
misrepresented, or drips intermittently
across their
newsfeed.
Science has
the potential to
provide solutions
to the world’s most
pressing problems:
Will the gene
editing tool Crispr/
Cas9 cure or kill us?
Why should I care
about dark matter?
Is global warming
inevitable? And
a question that
personally keeps me up at night: Why is
Alan Duffy always on my TV?
The truth is out there but sometimes
the facts can get lost in this tsunami of
science.
To ease your existential worry that
you’ll never be the ‘suppository of all
wisdom’, I have collated the thoughts of
some of the world’s greatest minds onthe year’s most important discoveries in
their fields, so you don’t have to.
It’s oK, you can thank me later.A Climatologist –
Dr linden Ashcroft
Earlier this year,
CSIRo sacked 350
climate scientists.
A move that
was described
as “political
vandalism” by
scientists.^1
Nonetheless,
science stops for
no man, including
Malcolm Turnbull,
and according
to Dr linden
Ashcroft, from Australia’s own Bureau
of Meteorology, there’s one publication
that stands head and shoulders above
the rest.
“one publication that has really stuck
with me this year is a study by Hawkins
et al. from the Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society about defining
the ‘pre-industrial’ period,” said Ashcroft.^2Every year, 2.5 million
scientific papers are
published; each one
incrementally adding
to the pool of human
knowledge. Good
luck wrapping your
head around that. For
scientists, even keeping
up to date with the most
important findings in their
field is a massive pain in
the arse.ARTICle BY: anDreW stapletOn