A Message

This past weekend, I took a Science Writing workshop from the team at the wonderful Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), including an awesome seminar from freelance science writer Katherine Kornei. Here are a few things I learned.

Decide your audience

Have a goal (or a few!)

Break your goal into messages

Distill your messages for maximum effectiveness

Here is my message board!

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And at the bottom, we were given 60 seconds to draw something that represented our message. To represent my message, which is that science is for everyone and scientists are people, too, I drew a person who is half in lab gear, and half in a dress with a cupcake (because they like baking!) It was a big hit.

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Katherine Kornei led us on various interactive writing exercises, writing headlines for different publications (with very different styles) and even writing journalistic pieces for various prompts. We were only given a short amount of time, of course, so our pieces were not nearly finished. I will put them in other blog posts so they can be commented on! Those posts are here and here.

The workshop was 10am-5pm, which meant that in order to get from Seattle to Portland and back, I needed to leave Seattle at 6:30am and I returned at around 8:30pm. Long day! When I got back to my apartment the first thing I did was snuggle up with my husband on the couch and play Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

I do enjoy the long, solitary drive. Long-distance driving was a dreadful bore for me as a child (I would get carsick if I read in the car, and reading was basically my only hobby). As an adult, with the ability to drive myself, I find it relaxing. Our four-day trip from Illinois to Seattle is a very happy memory for me. As is when we drove from Cape Cod to Illinois. Or when we drove from Oklahoma to Illinois. (This is why we named our car Nomad.)

There’s just something precious about having all that time to yourself, with nobody to hear you or look at you. You can talk, you can sing, you can have imaginary conversations with yourself, listen to music you’d rather no one know you like, and just generally be with yourself in a truly mindful way. It was something I needed, I think.

Support OMSI! They’re doing awesome science communication work. Thank you so much to Amanda Fisher for organizing the workshop, and to Katherine Kornei for her help and guidance!

Exercise: Writing about others’ research

Like this post, this writing also comes from an exercise I did at a science communication seminar with Katherine Kornei. We were given resources pertaining to this study, which found that mice who are deaf at birth make the same vocalizations as mice who hear from birth. This means that in mice, unlike in humans, the ability to vocalize is innate.

This time, my intended publication was something very challenging: Highlights.

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It was VERY challenging! Communicating science to kids is not my forte. But here it is!

Hearing Words

Ed the mouse cannot hear. He was born that way.

Gus the baby cannot hear. He was born that way. Ed and Gus are deaf.

Gus the baby drinks milk from his mom. Ed the mouse also drinks milk from his mom.

Gus the baby has brown hair like his dad. Ed the mouse also has brown hair like his dad.

“Say ‘momma’!” Gus’ mom says. Gus cannot hear her, and just smiles.

“Squeak!” Ed’s mom says. Ed cannot hear her.

“Squeak!” Ed says. He does not need to hear her to know how to squeak. He knew how to squeak when he was born.

Gus’ mom puts a hearing aid in Gus’ ear. The hearing aid lets Gus hear his mom! “Say ‘momma’!” Gus’ mom says. Gus hears her, and smiles.

“umma!” Gus says. He is almost right!

Exercise: Writing about your research

At a science communication seminar at OMSI on April 21st, I participated in several science writing exercises with science writer Katherine Kornei. This assignment was to write an article about our research with a particular publication in mind. This piece was written for Wired.

Audience [Wired]

Headline (an attention-grabbing statement): Bounce at Will

Subhead (expands on the headline; provides more detail): Computer simulations can use random chance to gain new insights into the quantum life of molecules

Lede (one sentence about the main result and its implications): Computational chemists are using random chance to their advantage in an algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo to discover the secrets of enigmatic molecules.

Body paragraphs (what did the scientists do; what did they find; implications):

Scientists can recognize molecules through the patterns of light they absorb (or emit) in a process called spectroscopy. These patterns of light are determined by how the atoms in the molecule bounce and move relative to each other—but some molecules refuse to play by the rules.

CH5+, the chemical white whale of spectroscopy, is one of these molecules. Its atoms flop around each other in such strange ways, its pattern of light just looks like noise to spectroscopy equipment. Quantum Monte Carlo may be the answer.

Monte Carlo algorithms are, as you may expect, named after the famous Monte Carlo casino. These algorithms rely on random chance, and careful supervision, to calculate non-random information. Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) is a breed of Monte Carlo that specifically focuses on quantum systems, such as molecules.

QMC isn’t tripped up by the strangeness of the molecule’s flops; its random number generator runs through them like a juggernaut.

I ended my writing here, since I don’t have any news-worthy results yet! But I enjoyed writing this little snippet about my research.

Grad School Slumps

I’m reaching a point in my graduate career where I’ve realized I don’t know what I’m doing.

Now, some of you may have squinted your eyes in suspicion at that statement, especially my fellow graduate students. Really? Just now you’ve had this realization? You’re a graduate student! Of course you don’t know what you’re doing!

But it’s more than just scientific knowledge, or research knowledge. It’s more of an existential question. What, exactly, am I doing?

I go to the office. I sit in my office chair. I might check some code, I might look over some edits for my paper, I’ll probably spend more than an hour doing reading and taking notes on the high-level theory that will form the basis of my thesis. I’ll do this until my eyes glaze over. Then I will go home.

Slumps happen. Your research has stalled. Your paper is spinning its wheels in the deep muck of “is this even worth writing about?” Every line of the textbook you’re reading has three words you don’t know, and the definitions of each of those words each has three more words you don’t know, and the tree of your ignorance grows ever-more branches. You dread going to work.

The question, really, is how to pull yourself out of a “slump.” It’s incredibly difficult. It’s a lot easier (and more appealing) to just say “I will work from home today” and then lay on the couch reading the same page over and over.

It is said that the best way to combat existential malaise is to take action. That’s what has gotten me out of my most recent slump: I coded a thing, the thing made a plot, and now I have a new result to chew on while I make progress on my paper. I have ideas for new plots. I will make those tomorrow.

Write some code. Take some action. Avoid the couch–it’s a trap. And remember you can always talk to loved ones or colleagues about how you’re feeling. The reminder that you have people in your life who support you and want to see you succeed is valuable beyond measure.

What does my knit sweater have in common with an avalanche?

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Avalanches don’t just happen on mountains! Scientists use the concept of an “avalanche” to describe other phenomena that evolve in similar ways, such as forest fires, a stock market crash, or solar flares. In a recent paper released on arXiv, French physicists made the argument that knit fabrics also behave in this “avalanche” fashion. This makes them very useful for studying the properties of avalanche behavior, since a knit is much easier than a mountain to fit into a lab!

An important part of describing avalanches is the phrase “stick-slip.” Imagine you are trying to push a heavy box of antiques across the floor of your grandmother’s basement. You push it, but it is heavier than you expected, and it doesn’t move. As you push harder and harder, eventually the box slips, and you can now push it across the floor with less force than what was needed to make it move in the first place. The moment when the box stopped sticking and started slipping is called a stick-slip event. You could also describe the very beginning of an avalanche–the instant when the soil/snow/sand at the top of the mountain begins to slip–as a stick-slip event.

Knit fabrics are made of a network of threads; these physicists showed experimentally that stick-slip events happen at the intersections of these threads when the fabric is stretched. The threads can hold on to each other for a time, but eventually they slip; the first intersection to stretch causes the next intersection to stretch, and the knit network expands in an avalanche-like fashion. This is slightly unusual because avalanche behavior is not typically expected in things that are as neat and ordered as textile fabrics (think of how chaotic a landslide is!).

Hopefully this discovery helps improve our knowledge of avalanches, and systems that act like them!

 

Knits: an archetype of soft amorphous materials.  Samuel Poincloux, Mokhtar Adda-Bedia, Frédéric Lechenault

Photo by Dom J from Pexels 

Blood of Komodo dragons could provide antibiotic alternative

pexels-photo-42754(Note: I initially wrote this piece for a workshop at ComSciCon-PNW 2017)

In January of 2017, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a much more frightening Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report than usual: a woman in Nevada had perished from a bacterial infection that no antibiotic in America could fight. Doctors administered 26 different antibiotics to no avail.

“If we’re waiting for some sort of major signal that we need to attack this internationally, we need an aggressive program, both domestically and internationally to attack this problem, here’s one more signal that we need to do that,” Lance Price, the head of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University, told STAT News.

Recently, researchers at George Mason University made a discovery that could add to science’s arsenal against antibiotic resistance: the presence of powerful antimicrobial chemical compounds in the blood of Komodo dragons. Continue reading “Blood of Komodo dragons could provide antibiotic alternative”

Me as an interviewee

I attended SciTalk 2018 this year in Portland, Oregon. It was a lot of fun! I learned a great deal from the experts and professionals who shared their knowledge and wisdom!

I attended a workshop run by Abby Olena that included a discussion on best practices when being interviewed. I volunteered to be the first interviewee; watch below!

The main suggestions I received afterward:

  • To start with my answer to “why should we care” : Because there are chemicals in space, and we need to be able to see them!
  • To start with a hook, something that catches the audience’s attention

(Also, I blink a lot more than I would think!)

What do you think? Do you have more suggestions for me? Share them below!