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22 April 2022
#AntarcticLog: Watch Your Language
#AntarcticLog is a series of comics by Karen Romano Young. You can find the originals here. Last week I posted about how I try to find the best visual image to convey the main point of a comic or visual story. This week I’m sharing just one image — an introduction to the JOIDES Resolution and Expedition #379, in which I took part three years ago, in 2019. I continue to …
15 April 2022
#AntarcticLog: Getting Graphic
At times the trouble isn’t finding science stories, it’s finding how to tell them. In comics, the words are vital, but the images are, dare I say, even more important. Why? Because they’re what catches your attention, clues you in, inviting you to read, and — in the best cases — they work to convey aspects of the science that just wouldn’t work as well in words. And, as experts in science education and communication know, the more modes you use to tell the story, the more eyes you’re going to get on your work.
8 April 2022
#AntarcticLog: Not just for kids
Illustrated stories are for kids, right? Not right at all! People of all ages read, laugh and cry over, learn from, and love pictures.
1 April 2022
#AntarcticLog: A Lite-Brite of SciArt
I got my start at Scholastic News, a classroom magazine for 11 and 12-year-olds that covered everything — so I had to interview everyone who was making news. I quickly realized that the people I liked talking to the most were scientists. They were the most passionate, the most enthralled, and they had the biggest lives — even as they focused on a small research topic or specific geographic area. To me they were dots of light that — like the Lite-Brite toy I’d grown up with — formed pictures.
21 March 2022
Volunteer-Driven Outreach Highlights Research at Scripps Oceanography
Have you ever been hugged by a sea urchin? Watching a young kid apprehensively place their finger between the spines of a sea urchin, then light up with excitement when the spines gently squeeze them is just one thing that motivates us to dedicate so much time to outreach. While we have the attention of that student, we can explain that photoreceptor (or light-sensing) cells on the tips of the urchin spines allow them to sense shadows and move their spines towards predators as a defense mechanism.
18 March 2022
#AntarcticLog: (Climate) refugees
Sometimes there just aren’t words to express my response to what’s going on. That’s what led me to comics in the first place — a grievous story of walrus stranded by climate change — and it’s what leads me on. What “does not compute” in words can make a connection in visuals.
11 March 2022
#AntarcticLog: Coming together for science
My Twitter feed is full of calls for peace. And last week’s #AntarcticLog post had a call for “more science!” Coming right up. Actually, Antarctica is proof that we can have peace and science, and that the countries of the world can come together to secure it.
4 March 2022
#AntarcticLog: A season at Palmer Station
Palmer is on Anvers Island on the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, a prime location for biology, such as Oregon State University researcher Thomas DesVignes’ study of icefish, aided by fishing from the deck of the Laurence M. Gould. Palmer’s supply ship…
28 February 2022
Earth science storytelling with community science
The standard scientific method begins with an observation. Then the scientist will create a hypothesis, collect evidence, test their theory, analyze data, and make a final conclusion. So much goes on behind the scenes before that data is available to the public and most people are even aware of a problem.
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.
The Plainspoken Scientist is the science communication blog of AGU’s Sharing Science program. With this blog, we wish to showcase creative and effective science communication via multiple mediums and modes.
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