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1 December 2020
Introducing #AntarcticLog
In 2017, I learned that after several years of applying, I’d finally made the cut: the National Science Foundation was funding me to travel to Palmer Station, Antarctica, under the Antarctic Artists and Writers program, as a member of a team of researchers from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. My plan: to create a visual journal that would show our experiences in writing and drawings. The intention: to share the journal online for the two-month duration of our trip.
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 November 2020
Share your #SciCommHomonym
Jargon—it’s everywhere, from your favorite sport to politics to your profession. This fact is especially true in the sciences where scientific jargon is often seen as a barrier to effectively communicating with non-science audiences.
2 November 2020
Sketch Your Science
Just because Fall Meeting is online this year doesn’t mean you can’t still participate. We’d love it if you shared a drawing—or drawings—of your research area, or you talk/poster, or even the science of someone else whose talk you found interesting, during Fall Meeting.
7 October 2020
Sharing Science scicomm workshops are now virtual!
By Shane M Hanlon We in Sharing Science do many different things. We’re scicomm trainers/practitioners, communicators, multimedia experts, artists, storytellers, and more. At the core of these various aspects of scicomm is the first item – training. Sharing Science was founded >5 years ago by my colleague Olivia with the goal of providing fellow scientists with the skills, tools, and resources they need to communicate science with any audience. The …
17 August 2020
International Observe the Moon Night: An Opportunity for Global Outreach
International Observe the Moon Night is an annual worldwide public engagement program that encourages observation, appreciation, and understanding of our Moon and its connection to planetary science and exploration. It is also a time to celebrate our personal and cultural connections to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor.
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.
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.
21 July 2020
Debunked Myths about the Bubonic Plague
The Black Death, believed to have been caused by infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed about 100 million people worldwide in the fourteenth century. However, there is still much that is unknown about this deadly disease, also known as the bubonic plague, and there are still myths about it that continue to be spread. Even though it wiped out a decent portion of Europe all those years ago, if someone were to contract the disease today it no longer means death thanks to modern medicine.
17 July 2020
Research Suggests Leprosy to be a Zoonosis, The Reservoir: Armadillos
Leprosy, renamed Hansen’s Disease, is a chronic condition caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae (M. leprae). The disease primarily targets the skin and peripheral nerves, however new forms of the bacteria have also been found to affect other areas such as the eyes, testicles, and bones. An individual, once infected, typically shows an incubation period of three to seven years.
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.