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25 February 2022
#AntarcticLog: Give me Shackleton
What can I say — Ernest Shackleton just kills me. Yes, Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole, and by goal-oriented criteria was the most successful. In a certain kind of heroic sense, Scott wins many hearts. But, as the saying goes, “Give me Shackleton.” He’s the one who got every single man of the Transantarctic Expedition home alive, though he left their ship, Endurance, to the Weddell Sea.
23 November 2021
Sharing Science at AGU21
Well, it’s that time of year again. No, not the holidays (well, yes, that too). It’s AGU’s Fall Meeting!
8 September 2021
Blogging for Science Unsealed
For six years, I participated in one of the most impactful science communication endeavors I’ll ever embark on: I ran Science Unsealed, the blog from the Illinois Science Council. The ISC aims to give folks an opportunity to explore their scientific curiosity, and the blog was my opportunity to further their mission. Besides educating the public, running Science Unsealed did something extra for me: it helped me discover my passion for science writing.
23 April 2021
#AntarcticLog: Happy Earth Day!
If you think it’s tough scuba diving in icy Antarctic waters, try doing it while pulling up old tires, rails of steel, and other junk. I spent Earth Day, April 22, 2018, at Palmer Station, Antarctica, helping pull old trash out of Hero Inlet.
21 December 2020
(Re)introducing the Sharing Science Virtual Learning Hub
For each webinar, we’ve created additional content to convey key points via multiple mediums. I’ve taken to TikTok and Reels to create scicomm videos with my dog. Our own Olivia Ambrogio has flexed her artistic drawing skills by creating <1-minute animations as well as animated webinar summaries. And our graphic design department has been putting together infographic summaries.
30 November 2020
So you wanna host a Twitter takeover…
A few years ago, when we in Sharing Science first stood up our Twitter account, I had the idea to take over the @IAmSciComm rocur account. Basically, @IAmSciComm (along with all of these accounts) allows users to take control for various periods of time to talk about things related to the account, in this case, scicomm. It was a great experience that allowed us to let the world know about the scicomm tips, tools, and resources that we have, as well as good marketing for our fledgling Twitter account.
9 September 2020
Want to do outreach but don’t know where to start? We got you.
Science communication is a catch-all phrase that means so many things. Even when narrowing it down to scientists talking about their research to (mostly) non-scientists, there are still so many avenues and places to start.
24 July 2020
Zoonotic Diseases: Plugging the Source Before the Flood
A whopping seventy-five percent of emerging diseases have been said to be zoonotic, meaning that such diseases can spread from wildlife to humans, an example being our current pandemic consisting of Covid-19 a bat-to-human infection.
23 July 2020
Reduction of Ice Extent in Arctic Region Cause PDV Transmission Between Arctic and Pacific Region
This article focuses on reduction of sea ice extent in Arctic region which is caused by climate change might introduce many diseases that are locked in Arctic to sub-Arctic regions. The virus they track is called Phocine distemper disease (PDV), and it is a pathogen that majorly causes high rate of mortality in European harbor seals of northern Atlantic Ocean.
22 July 2020
The Four Corners Outbreak of 1993
In May, 1993 a 19-year old man suddenly developed shortness of breath while driving through the Four Corners region in New Mexico. He had complained of fever and muscle pain a few days before, but generally was in good health. By the time he pulled over and paramedics arrived, he had gone into respiratory failure and later died from an acute pulmonary edema in the emergency department of Gallup Indian Medical Center.
The Plainspoken Scientist is the science communication blog of AGU’s Sharing Science program. With this blog, we wish to encourage scientists to reach out to non-scientists and to do so with plainspoken discussion.