storytelling – Australian Science

A Secret Code to the Cosmos is Hidden in the Light

Danica Radovanovic — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:01:25 +0000

Are you watching the new Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey – the scientific documentary television series? I am, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it! The series is a follow-up to the 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which was presented by Carl Sagan. The all new Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey science documentary consists of thirteen episodes and just like the original program, continues to use a storytelling approach to present complex astronomy and science concepts in an accessible and entertaining manner. The episodes feature the latest information which has been updated since the 1980 series and uses substantial computer-generated special effects and animation to illustrate and enhance the narration.

The series is hosted and presented by astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was inspired by Sagan as a college student. He created a new version of the series, aiming to reach a wider audience and not just those specifically interested in the sciences.

The entire Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey series is dedicated to exploring how we discovered different laws of nature and explaining how scientists found our Earthly coordinates in space and time in relation to the universe and created a vision of the cosmos. Listening to the great narratives, watching the stars, and contemplating the scale of space and time relative to Earth, is enough to humble any scientifically curious soul.

My favourite episode, called “Hiding in the Light

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The Highlights of 2013

Danica Radovanovic — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 10:04:12 +0000

This year our writers churned out a host of fantastic articles, including a series of posts dedicated to women in space, written by Sharon Harnett. One of the most notable of the series was all about Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman astronaut. This year was the 50th anniversary of her historic spaceflight. We also had a few great interviews, including one with Henry Reich, creator of the YouTube series Minute Physics. We’ve managed a number of achievements. We’ve helped several science writers gain exposure and reputation world wide, we’ve appeared on ABC’s Newsline, and we’ve been listed in TED’s top 10 science and technology websites.

So, in no particular order, here are ten of our favourite articles from 2013. We hope you’ll enjoy these stories. Stay curious and scientifically passionate!

A Tale of Two STEM Women by Buddhini Samarasinghe

When I first read this story, I was struck by how often we focus on happy stories like Marie Curie’s, and how the story of someone like Clara Immerwahr remains largely forgotten. She had a tremendous amount of potential, as evidenced by her being the first female to receive a Ph.D at the University of Breslau, an endeavor that is certainly not for the faint-hearted even now. One can only wonder at the ‘might-have-beens’ if she had had the same support and encouragement that Marie Curie did, if she had not married Haber, or if Haber had been a different kind of person. These examples highlight that talent alone is not enough; we need to encourage that talent by promoting equality and recognizing our own biases when it comes to women in STEM. Read more>>

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman (in science) by Amy Reichelt

Obtaining a senior academic position for any aspiring young academic is one of those uphill struggles with roads lined with self doubt, setbacks and sacrifice. Some call it the way to tenure-track, in my mind it’s one of those ill-defined paths through a potentially haunted forest inhabited with monsters, gigantic poisonous spiders and creepy people who communicate by screaming. It can be harder still to even reach that point, particularly for young women. While the number of women professors in Europe, N. America and Australia has increased over the last decade, universities still have a disproportionately small number of women in senior professorial positions. Read more>>

Spiders on Mars? No, An Australian Radio Telescope! by Elizabeth Howell

The MWA is a powerful telescope in its own right, but what is even more exciting is it will form part of a larger project in the coming years. The Square Kilometre Array will link radio telescopes on two continents — Australia and Africa — to get a fine look at the sky in radio wavelengths. MWA is just one part of this array. There will also be dish receptors in eight countries in Africa, with the core and some mid-frequency aperture arrays in South Africa’s Karoo desert. Read more>>

Hopeful results in latest HIV vaccine trial, but many hurdles to overcome yet by David Borradale

A HIV vaccine, known as SAV001-H has shown promising results in an early clinical trial, with no adverse effects reported and importantly, a significant increase reported in HIV specific antibodies in participants who received the vaccine. In this trial, 33 HIV positive participants were randomly allocated to one of two groups: half into a treatment group receiving the vaccine and half into a placebo group who did not receive the vaccine. The participants were followed up at regular periods, testing safety of the vaccine and antibody response over a one year period. Read more>>

Are Australians Really Getting Dumber? by Magdeline Lum

The Australian Academy of Science has found that when it comes to science Australians are getting dumber in its latest report on science literacy. Compared to three years ago, less people in Australia know that the Earth’s orbit of the sun takes one year. Among 18-24 year olds 62% surveyed knew the correct answer, a fall from 74% three years ago. Other results would also send scientists into a tail spin of despair, with 27% of respondents saying that the earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs, though an improvement from 30% of respondents in 2010 who thought this. What does this all say? If you take the face value of the press release and the ensuing media coverage, Australians are getting dumber. Read more>>

From fables to Facebook: Why do we tell stories? by Lauren Fuge

Storytelling is one of our most fundamental communication methods, for an obvious reason: narrative helps us cognise information. Telling intelligible, coherent stories to both ourselves and others helps our brains to organise data about our lives and our world. But when we askwhy stories are so effective at helping us cognise information, the answers are surprising: it seems that somewhere in the otherwise ruthless process of natural selection, evolution has wired our brains to prefer storytelling over other forms of communication. Read more>>

Plastic’s Reach by Kelly Burnes

Plastic. Seems it has extended its reach into the farthest corners of the universe. An earliest post described how plastic has changed our lives, for better…and for worse. ADD link to earlier post. That post largely reflected on the growing problem of plastic in the oceans and the effect on plant and animal life. Now, it seems that plastic threatens our freshwater lakes now too. Read more>>

Postcard from Spitzer: weather on 2M2228 is hot and cloudy by Kevin Orrman-Rossiter

Long distance weather reports are now a commonality. The report for 2MASSJ22282889-431026 is somewhat unusual. It forecasts wind-driven, planet-sized clouds, with the light varying in time, brightening and dimming about every 90 minutes. The clouds on 2MASSJ22282889-431026 are composed of hot grains of sand, liquid drops of iron, and other exotic compounds. Definitely not the first place to spend a summer holiday. Not that 2MASSJ22282889-431026 (or 2M2228 as it is known in The Astrophysical Journal Letters) will appear on a travel itinerary anytime soon. For 2M2228 is a brown dwarf, 39.1 light years from earth. Read more>>

The bacteria that live inside hurricanes by Charles Ebikeme

Seven miles above the Earth’s surface, where the weather is born, lies the troposphere – the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. Up there, where the clouds dance around, are bacteria that can make it rain, and are important for the formation of clouds. The atmospheric microbiome is a concept and field of study that is gaining importance. As we come to grips with a changing climate and environment, understanding more and more our Earth ecosystem remains vital. With hurricane damage in the US and elsewhere seemingly on an exponential increase in recent decades, it is important to mitigate for the worst. Read more>>

Quantum computing: Australian researchers store data on a single atom! by Markus Hammonds

Computing is also an incredibly fast moving field of technology, and research is finally taking us towards the exciting world of quantum computing! Quantum computers will work using quantum bits, or qubits for short, which are analogous to the digital bits used in computers like the one which you’re using to read this article. Recently, a team of engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time ever, how a single atom can be act as a qubit, effectively showing the first step in building an ultra fast quantum computer. And they might just have created the best qubit ever made. Read more>>

Happy 2014 from Markus, Charles, Kevin, Kelly, and Danica!

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Big Data…Big Deal

Kelly Burnes — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:32:20 +0000

Data is everywhere. Via CRN.

Data is everywhere. It touches and informs every aspect of our lives.

You go to the doctor, and your medical records are electronic on a computer screen before your eyes.

You bank online.

The stock market is all done by computers.

We are living in The Data Age.

I grew up in a time where the word data seemed to be only used in science classrooms. Now, it’s data this, data that, data here, data there. Consumer technology and social media have shot data out of a cannon. We want to pinpoint the minutiae of every day life down to the smallest factoid so that a story can be told from it. And this is not such a bad thing, but it does make me wonder what the next 50 years will bring. How much more can we manipulate and manufacture data into other ‘life’ forms?

It seems as though modern times are placing a huge expectation upon big data; mainly, that it will solve all of our problems. And while there is this potential to help us make informed decisions, we cannot expect data to tell us what the decisions are that need to be made. Creativity is the first ingredient in the blender.

This creativity emerges again in the processing of the data and figuring out the best means to present the data in a way that paints a story that is easily understandable. Many are not literate in data and this divide is very clear in different populations of students and communities. How we teach data literacy in schools is and will be increasingly important. How kids learn the very act of searching the Internet will be crucial in helping them understand data and how to present that data.

A good example of teaching data literacy comes from within my own family. A 70-year old man wanted to learn how to use the Internet. His sons tried, became frustrated at the process. The sons passed him onto the grandsons, who became frustrated as granddad paused to write down every step so he could get online by himself. One of the sons, a principal at a primary school tried something different. He brought his dad to school and set him down in the computer class with the 8-year-olds. There he learned everything he needed to know – how to get online, how to search. Now he’s planning trips to the Italian Alps, keeping up on the golf scores, staying in touch with his children over email, reading history books online.

The Internet of Everything is expanding. Machines are connected globally. Data has gotten big, really big. Data illiteracy and a lack of computer basics will continue to divide populations. However, with the right instruction, generational gaps can be bridged. Fundamentally how we learn is the same; it’s just the tools that are changing. Big data is changing the world.

Cite this article:
Burnes K (2013-09-13 00:32:20). Big Data…Big Deal . Australian Science. Retrieved: May 04, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/news/big-databig-deal/

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From fables to Facebook: Why do we tell stories?

Lauren — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:33:20 +0000

Cave painting, Lascaux, France, 15,000-10,000 BC

Throughout human history, stories have existed across all cultures in all forms, from ballads, poems, songs to oral history, plays, novels. Some narratives have evolved along with the human species—we are consistently drawn back to ancient parables, fables and fairytales, constantly reworking them into modern contexts.

Narrative is a gift unique to the human species, but how as it survived for so long? Is it a by-product of evolution or essential to survival? What drove us to painstakingly inscribe portraits on rocky walls in ochre and charcoal, to compose and listen to lengthy ballads of heroes’ tales, to nosily read people’s Facebook statuses about their day, to devour novels and films like we’re hungry for fictional worlds? Neuroscience and developmental psychology have begun to answer these questions, embarking on the ambitious task of explaining why we tell stories.

Storytelling is one of our most fundamental communication methods, for an obvious reason: narrative helps us cognise information. Telling intelligible, coherent stories to both ourselves and others helps our brains to organise data about our lives and our world. But when we ask why stories are so effective at helping us cognise information, the answers are surprising: it seems that somewhere in the otherwise ruthless process of natural selection, evolution has wired our brains to prefer storytelling over other forms of communication.

Good stories engage us. When we hear plain, bloodless facts, the language processing centres of our brain light up and we decode words into meaning—but when we’re told a story, not only are language processing centres lit up, but also a vast array of other regions distinct from those centres. For example, if you tell a friend a story about a dinner party at which you ate delicious roast pork, their sensory cortex will light up; or if you tell them about the game of football, their motor cortex will become active. The parts of the brain they would use if actually experiencing the event light up, even though they are only being told about it.

This is particularly interesting when considering the effect that literary techniques have on our brain activity. In a 2006 study published in NeuroImages, Spanish researchers asked participants to read both neutral words (such as chair and key) as well as words with strong odour associations (such as coffee, perfume, lavender and soap). Brain scans using an fMRI machine showed that when they read the odour-associated words, their primary olfactory cortex lit up; but when they read the neutral words, that region remained dark. In another study at Emory University, texture metaphors such as “the singer had a velvet voice

Cite this article:
Fuge L (2013-06-18 00:33:20). From fables to Facebook: Why do we tell stories?. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 04, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/psychology/from-fables-to-facebook-why-do-we-tell-stories/

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