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Inspiring Science

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Inspiring Science

Category Archives: Science communication

Fight back against junk food marketing

24 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by sedeer in Disease, Humans, Science communication

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Children, crowd funding, diet, Education, food, games, Health, Human, junk food, People, science and society, Science in Society

Frugivoro: a board game about health foodMost people realize that our food is loaded with sugar and that our eating habits are unhealthy, but it’s very hard to change them. Rather than simply accepting the situtation or complaining about it, my sister-in-law and her mother decided to change it. Over the past several years, they’ve designed, tested, and refined a new board game, Frugivoro, that gets kids excited about healthy foods (and sneaks in some education, too!). Many of our eating habits form in childhood, so this is a create way to counter the deluge of junk food marketing kids are exposed to. Continue reading →

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The Social Evolution Forum

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by sedeer in Blog, Science communication

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Education, evolution, science and society, Science communication, Science in Society

I’m very pleased to be part of the Evolution Institute‘s new group blog, The Social Evolution Forum. SEF brings together a range of writers concerned with evolution in a broad sense, from ecology to cultural evolution. To get an idea of what SEF is about, have a look at DS Wilson’s announcement post.

My first post is on a pernicious and persistent misunderstanding of evolution: the myth of progress.

Evolutionary theory is extremely powerful and pervasively misunderstood. Stripped to its core, it describes an interplay between replication, variation, and selection which can generate complexity, diversity, and novelty. Its elegance lies in its simplicity and power, a combination which unfortunately also makes it readily misunderstood.

The idea of evolutionary progress is the most common – and probably the most damaging – misunderstanding of evolution. It lingers behind the phrase “higher animals” and the claim that humans evolved from apes (we are apes). It lurches into full view in the famous March of Progress illustration which has, unfortunately, become iconic of evolution.

You can read the whole thing on the SEF site. While you’re there, have a look at the other inaugural posts by Arun Sethuraman, Lee Alan Dugatkin, Jennifer Raff, Anthony Biglan, Jeremy Yoder, Madhusudan Katti, and Peter Turchin to get an idea of the voices and approaches you’ll find on the Social Evolution Forum.

I’ve been interviewed!

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by sedeer in Blog, Science communication

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Popular science, science and society, Science communication, Science in Society, writing

I’m thrilled to let you know that I’ve been interviewed on the Scientific American blog network!  The SA Incubator posts interviews of “young and up-and-coming science, health and environmental writers and reporters”.  I’ve read a couple of the interviews over the last year and was hoping to get interviewed one day, so I was very excited when I got an email last week from Khalil Cassimally inviting me for an interview.  I really enjoyed answering the questions and I hope you’ll enjoy what I had to say.  It’s also a great chance for me to get more exposure, so I’m very grateful for the opportunity.

On another subject, I tried something different in my most recent post on Accumulating Glitches and I’d love to hear what you think — what works for you, what doesn’t, how I could do better.  The post is about ants which practice agriculture and what they might think of the way we farm…

Hauskaa Juhannusta to those of you in Finland!  If anyone will be at the WCSJ 2013 meeting in Helsinki next week, let me know and we can try to meet up!

 

Three things to look for in science reporting

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by sedeer in Science communication

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

science, science and society, Science communication, Science in Society

Some time ago I shared some of my thoughts on science communication, including the importance of learning “to approach issues critically, to question and to reason, [so they would] have the wherewithal to challenge fixed beliefs and undermine authority”.  I’ve also written about things like cognitive dissonance and how our social environment can shape the way we conduct research or interpret the results.  In this post,  I’d like to highlight a few of the flaws you might come across in scientific research and what you should look out for when you hear about a new study.  I’ve picked out just three things you can check to help reassure yourself that a science story is on sound footing, but I hope people will chime in with more suggestions in the comments!
Continue reading →

Do species really exist?

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by sedeer in Blog, Evolution, Science communication

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

biology, Charles Darwin, evolution, nature, science, Science communication, Species

I mentioned a while ago that I’d been invited to write about evolution for Nature’s Scitable blog network.  The network finally relaunched this week and my new group blog, Accumulating Glitches, went live earlier today!  Together with Sarah Jane Alger, I’ll be writing about how evolution works and the amazing world it has created — “exploring the grandeur of evolution”.  We’re planning to post every Monday and I hope you’ll join us there — we’ve got lots of exciting stories to share!  For now, here’s a taste of the inaugural post:

Faced with the rich diversity of living beings around us, humans have proven unable to resist the temptation to try to organize and categorize them. We have a natural tendency to classify things, a habit that’s deeply rooted in our cognition and use of language. Our brain excels at recognizing patterns (and thus finding meaning where it doesn’t exist), an ability that allows us to interact with the world using names — like “chair” — that we might be hard-pressed to properly explain. In fact, it’s surprisingly difficult to define even a seemingly straightforward word like “chair” in a way that would let us recognize everything that should be included (from office chairs and recliners to stools and wheelchairs) but nothing that shouldn’t (like tables, tree stumps, or other things we might decide to sit on).

Despite these difficulties, we’ve been classifying organisms throughout the history of human thought, from Aristotle’s division between plants and animals to modern scientific nomenclature. The modern classification system is based on grouping organisms into units called ‘species’; species, in turn, group together into a larger units called genus, family, order, and so on through the nested hierarchy of life. What make a species, though? Why should a particular group of organisms be thought of as a unit and given a distinct name? How do we decide which organisms make up a species?

Read the rest over at Accumulating Glitches…

Fam38A: another piece of the cancer puzzle

17 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by sedeer in Humans, Science communication

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

biology, Cancer, Health, Human, Lung cancer, Metastasis, Popular science, science, Science communication, Science in Society, sclc patients, small cell lung cancer, Tumor, tumour cells

Histopathologic image of small cell carcinoma of the lung. CT-guided core needle biopsy. (Image credit: Wikipedia)A team of researchers in the UK have discovered how the absence of a single gene makes it easier for tumour cells to migrate more freely in lung cancer patients. More people suffer  — and die — from lung cancer than any other kind.  Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is an extremely aggressive form of lung cancer thanks to its tendency to metastasise quickly, spreading to other organs early. In order to migrate, metastasising tumour cells have to break free of the extracellular matrix (ECM), the network of material around our cells which supports them and binds them to each other. That’s where this particular gene, Fam38A, comes into the story. Continue reading →

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All text and original images by Sedeer El-Showk. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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