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Cool science memories from the team

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Enough about you—what about us?

It would be correct to say that here at Talk Science to Me, we pretty much eat, sleep and breathe science. In fact, that’s how our mastermind, Eve Rickert, explained her journey into #scicomm for a class of health science writers at Kwantlen Polytechnic University we were invited to speak to earlier this month. From tales of the pistol-packing shrimp that stuns its prey with sound waves, to the excitement of bacteriophages that bring the dead back to life, Eve brought a fresh sense of marvel and storytelling about the world of science writing to inspire the students.

But what about the rest of the team? What particular moments hooked them into reporting, editing and designing science materials? Read on to find out more…

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Around town: 6th Networking World Anesthesia Conference

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1753_Traversi_Operation_anagoriaThe Networking World Anesthesia Convention (NWAC) takes place next week in Vancouver, BC, bringing together clinicians and researchers working in this vital medical field. It is worth remembering that without adequate anesthesia, modern medicine and surgery would be stuck in the quick and dirty field of “getting it over with fast”: read Fanny Burney’s account of a conscious mastectomy to get a feel for uncensored steel (note: not for the faint of heart).

Quite simply put, anesthesia makes a lot of modern medicine possible. From regional or local to full-immersion general anesthesia, the power of the drugs and the skill of the anesthetist smooth the way for both patient and clinician.

But how does it work—how does anesthesia take the unpleasantness away?

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The famous "pale blue dot" photograph, showing Earth as a pale blue dot in the ecliptic as viewed from the Voyager space probe.

Delayed valentine: Worth waiting for?

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The famous "pale blue dot" photograph, showing Earth as a pale blue dot in the ecliptic as viewed from the Voyager space probe.
Every human that ever lived, lived inside that pale blue dot.

Sometimes, the best valentines are those that arrive late, long after the roses have withered and the chocolates have been consumed.

At around the same time that I started high school, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft blasted off on its journey to the outer planets. Thirteen years later and nearing the end of its planned primary mission, it turned its onboard cameras back toward the centre of our solar system. On February 14th, 1990, Voyager 1 took what is commonly known as the Pale Blue Dot image of Earth.

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Around town: The 6th International Conference on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder

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Conferences are great places to hang out if you’re a scientist. The buzz of knowledge fills the air, and it’s often the only chance you get to brainstorm with like-minded enthusiasts in your field. By the end of the conference, you are high on knowledge transfer and giddy with sharing the science…and exhausted. But then you take it all back to your lab and the sharing process begins again.

This week, Vancouver hosts the 6th Annual Conference on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). Hosted by Interprofessional Continuing Education of the University of British Columbia, the conference brings together delegates with expertise in research, teaching, counselling, justice and other related fields to highlight recent research progress. It is truly a multidisciplinary event, because FASD affects people in so many different ways and touches every level of society. Read on to learn a little more about what’s happening in your neighbourhood and beyond.

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Crowdfunding science: Why donate, part II

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Why support crowdfunding for science research?

Graphs from CF1.We were curious about this question, and we decided to take the opportunity presented by the annual meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science and the first conference of the newly formed Citizen Science Association, which both took place in San Jose last week and this weekend. We put together a short survey and tweeted/blogged/Facebooked it to the attendees and our followers: to you laypeople, this is what’s known as a “convenience sample” (convenience sampling is the reason so much basic research is done on university students). We figured a few thousand people keen on advancing science generally and citizen science in particular would be a great way to find people who had supported science crowdfunding.

The response, unfortunately, was not what we’d hoped. We had seven responses, with one respondent giving reasons for supporting science via crowdfunding. A huge thank you to those who participated. While we sure won’t be publishing any papers with these responses (and that was never the plan anyway!), we can talk about the data points we got—and for those who are keen to learn more, we’ve added some links at the end.Read More »Crowdfunding science: Why donate, part II

Crowdfunding science – Why donate?

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If you work in science research at almost any level these days, you’ll be aware of how difficult it is to get funded to carry out or continue with a project. Whether you are a doctoral student working on a cherished thesis or an “established” academic, you know that the monies available are slipping behind the needs and desires of the industry. No matter how excellent, hot-shot or meaningful the work is, grant funds are drying up.

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First medical X-ray by Wilhelm Roentgen, of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig's hand. When she saw her skeleton, Anna is said to have uttered, "I have seen my death". By Wilhelm Röntgen (public domain).

The benefit of accident and coincidence in radioactivity

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coincidence = [noun] a chance occurrence of events remarkable either for being simultaneous or for apparently being connected. Synonyms: accident, luck, fate

First medical X-ray by Wilhelm Roentgen, of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig's hand. When she saw her skeleton, Anna is said to have uttered, "I have seen my death". By Wilhelm Röntgen (public domain).
First medical X-ray by Wilhelm Roentgen, of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig’s hand. When she saw her skeleton, Anna is said to have uttered, “I have seen my death”. By Wilhelm Röntgen (public domain).

During a non-accidental* wander through the Pacific Science Center’s online calendar of scientific events, I noticed one of those divine coincidences that is probably only exciting to me and maybe a few other calendar/science nerds out there.

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