The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 (2 page)

A
LICE
G
ORMAN
is an archaeologist who specialises in the material culture of space exploration, with a focus on orbital debris or space junk. She is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Flinders University, and a member of the Space Industry Association of Australia. Alice has worked extensively in indigenous heritage management across Australia, providing heritage advice for industry, government and Aboriginal groups. She tweets as @drspacejunk.

T
OM
G
RIFFITHS
is the WK Hancock Professor of History at the Australian National University, chair of the editorial board of the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
and director of the Centre for Environmental History at ANU. His prize-winning books include
Hunters and Collectors
,
Forests of Ash
and
Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica
. His latest book, written with Christine Hansen, is
Living with Fire
. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

R
ICHARD
G
UILLIATT
is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in many Australian and overseas publications. He is the author of two books,
Talk of the Devil
and
The Wolf
:
How one German raider terrorised Australia and the southern oceans in the First World War
, co-authored with Peter Hohnen. He is a staff writer at
The Weekend Australian Magazine
.

V
ANESSA
H
ILL
is a science communicator and media producer based in New York City. Vanessa is the creator, writer and host of BrainCraft, a PBS series exploring psychology, neuroscience and behaviour. She previously worked for the CSIRO, where she managed their social media and edited the CSIRO news blog, and also acted as a CSIRO spokesperson and science reporter to Australian broadcast media.

L
EAH
K
AMINSKY
, an award-winning physician and writer, is poetry and fiction editor at the
Medical Journal of Australia
. Her forthcoming books include
Cracking the Code
with the Damiani family (2015), a literary non-fiction book about cultural attitudes to death (2015), and a novel,
The Waiting Room
(2016). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. <
www.leahkaminsky.com
>

S
ARAH
K
ELLETT
travelled around Australia with the Shell Questacon Science Circus in 2010 and has earned a graduate diploma in science communication. After freelance writing and world travel, she now works at the CSIRO in Canberra as a science writer and content development editor for
Scientriffic
and
The Helix
, two magazines for kids and teens. Sarah also regularly writes the CSIRO's
Science by Email
, edits
Maths and Stats by Email
and she is halfway through writing a novel.

M
ICHAEL
L
ARDELLI
teaches genetics and uses zebrafish to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying Alzheimer's disease at the University of Adelaide. He received a BSc (Hons) from the University of Sydney in 1984 and a PhD in 1991 from the Council for National Academic Awards in the UK. He returned to Australia in 1997 after a further six years of postdoctoral work at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and at Uppsala University in Sweden.

W
ILLIAM
L
AURANCE
is a distinguished professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland. His research focuses on human impacts on tropical forests and biodiversity, and conservation policy. He works in the Amazon, Africa, south-east Asia and tropical Australia and has published eight books and more than 400 scientific and popular articles. He has received many scientific honors including the prestigious Heineken Prize for Environment Sciences and BBVA Foundation Frontiers in Ecology and Conservation Biology Award.

L
UDWIG
L
EICHHARDT
, naturalist and explorer, was born in Prussia in 1813 and undertook studies including philosophy, languages and natural sciences. He arrived in Sydney in February 1842 keen to explore Australia, and undertook the first overland expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington in 1844–45. In 1848, he made a second attempt to cross Australia from east to west, leaving the last outpost of settlement in central Queensland in early April. He was never seen again.

D
YANI
L
EWIS
is a freelance science writer. Her writing has appeared in
Science
,
Nature Medicine
and
Cosmos
and on the ABC online and other websites. When not writing about science, she is a producer and host for
Up Close
, the University of Melbourne's podcast, and is a regular co-host on Triple R's
Einstein-a-Go-Go
radio show. She has a PhD in plant genetics, but much prefers writing about other people's work to being in the lab herself.

I
AN
L
OWE
is emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University. He directed Australia's Commission for the Future in 1988, chaired the first State of the Environment advisory council in 1996 and has held many other advisory roles at all levels of government. A Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2001 for services to science and technology.

P
ETER
M
C
A
LLISTER
is an archaeologist and anthropologist from Griffith University's Gold Coast Campus. His major research interests are human evolution and the physical anthropology of ancient hominins, and he writes funny, informative books about the anthropology of the human condition. Outside his science writing, McAllister has worked as a journalist, a graphic artist, an advertising salesman for a country music radio station, and once (almost) a Chinese-speaking rugby league commentator.

I
AIN
M
C
C
ALMAN
was born in Nyasaland (Malawi), schooled in Zimbabwe and undertook his higher education at ANU and Monash. He is a professor in history at the University of Sydney, co-director of the Sydney Environment Institute, and in 2007 was awarded an AO for services to history and the humanities. His current book,
The Reef: A passionate history
, was published in Australia in late 2013 and in the USA in 2014.

P
AUL
M
AGEE
studied classical languages and Russian and since 2004 has taught poetry composition and criticism at the University of Canberra, where he is an associate professor. He is the author of two books of poems,
Stone Postcard
and
Cube Root of Book
, and has also published a prose ethnography,
From Here to Tierra del Fuego
(2000).

P
ETER
M
EREDITH
's fascination with science was sparked by a high-school science teacher who brought an unexploded German incendiary bomb into class and, with the help of his pupils, dismantled it, analysed the main incendiary chemical and set some of it off. A science writer, journalist, author and editor, he has worked in the UK, southern Africa and Australia, and his articles have appeared in more than 20 publications. He has written seven books and edited and/or co-authored a further eight.

J
AMES
M
ITCHELL
C
ROW
is deputy editor of
Cosmos
magazine. A chemist by training, he began his science writing career with
Chemistry World
magazine, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK, before joining
New Scientist
, where he worked in London as a features editor. In 2010 he left the UK to move to Australia, where he began writing freelance for various publications, including
Nature
.

B
IANCA
N
OGRADY
is a freelance science journalist and author who is yet to meet a piece of scientific research she doesn't find fascinating. She has covered the length and breadth of science and medicine, and also explored sustainable innovation and death (separately) in her two non-fiction books,
The Sixth Wave
and
The End
.

M
EREDI
O
RTEGA
was born in Albany, WA, and grew up in the mining town of Tom Price. Her poems have appeared in
Australian Love Poems
,
Cordite
, the
Science Made Marvellous
chapbooks,
The Disappearing
,
Westerly
, and
indigo
. She won
Australian Poetry
's Science Poetry Prize in 2013.

N
ICKY
P
HILLIPS
is science editor at the
Sydney Morning Herald
. She was previously a radio reporter and producer with ABC Radio National and a science writer for ABC Online. Nicky has a bachelor of science and post-graduate qualifications in journalism. Her story on scientists' attempts to resurrect an extinct species of frog was featured in last year's
Best Australian Science Writing
. She also mentors science journalists for the World Federation of Science Journalists.

J
OHN
P
ICKRELL
is an award-winning journalist, editor of
Australian Geographic
, and author of
Flying Dinosaurs
. He has worked in London, Washington DC and Sydney and written for publications
including
New Scientist
,
Science, Science News
,
Cosmos
,
National Geographic
and
Scientific American
. A three-time finalist in the Australian Museum Eureka prizes, he has won an Earth Journalism Award and been featured in
Best Australian Science Writing 2011
. Find him on Twitter @john_pickrell.

S
TEPHEN
P
INCOCK
has been writing about science for 20 years, working for newspapers, magazines, wire services, websites and journals in Australia, Europe, the UK and the USA. He's the author or co-author of four books, including
The Origins of the Universe for Dummies
. He now works as managing editor, Asia-Pacific, for Macmillan Science Communication, based in Sydney.

M
ICHAEL
S
LEZAK
is
New Scientist
's correspondent in Australasia. Working on a location-based beat means Michael has developed a ridiculously eclectic mix of specialties, including the Higgs boson, Darwinian approaches to cancer treatment, evidence-based drug policy and climate change. Before working at
New Scientist
Michael was a medical reporter and before that he studied the philosophy of science and spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of time, thermodynamics and causality.

T
HOMAS
S
UDDENDORF
was born in Germany and is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. He has received honors and distinctions for both his research and teaching from such organisations as the Association for Psychological Science, the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and the American Psychological Association. He has written more than 70 scientific papers, including a 2007 article on foresight that has become one of the most highly cited in the field of neuroscience and behaviour.

Foreword: Clear and simple

Ian Lowe

There was a time when science was seen as a body of secure knowledge, given credibility by the scientific method and peer review. Back in the 1970s when I was a young lecturer at the UK Open University, the task of communicating science to the general public was straightforward, at least in principle. I had to understand the science well enough to explain it clearly and simply, then craft that explanation. A coalminers' strike, which led to electricity restrictions, and the OPEC oil crisis had made the public aware of the importance of energy to modern lifestyles. So I found myself explaining the alternatives to coal-fired electricity, including nuclear power and the radical proposal to harness solar energy. At the time, nuclear power had a reasonable safety record, but there were emerging issues of cost and waste management, while solar power was an innovative technology so expensive it was only used on spacecraft. People were clearly excited by the idea that the physics of semiconductors could be used to power their homes.

The idea of communicating science, however, was regarded with suspicion and hostility by some within the scientific
community. When Barry Jones was minister for science in the 1980s, he observed that in the lexicon of scientific abuse, ‘populariser' ranked just above ‘child molester' – there was a feeling that you were letting the side down by explaining the science in terms that were accessible to the general public, in the same spirit as magicians giving away the secrets of their craft. There had always been a small group of prominent scientists who communicated openly and well, but most of their younger colleagues kept to their laboratories. Some scientists clearly wanted to maintain their community esteem by demonstrating that they understood principles that were a mystery to the general public.

Those views are less frequently held today, with a growing acceptance that the public has a right to know what they are supporting. Even if those who pay the piper don't call the tune, they should at least hear the music. And it's also fair to say that there is a much greater imperative for effective communication of science, now that understanding the science is critical both to recognising the challenges we face and to shaping sensible solutions to those ‘wicked problems'.

At the same time, we have become more realistic about the limits of scientific knowledge. No longer seen as a body of permanent truth, we now recognise science as a process of successive approximations to an understanding that will always have limitations and uncertainties: ‘islands of understanding in an endless sea of mystery,' as the distinguished biologist David Ehrenfeld describes it.