At that point, I knew I wanted to think about broader science questions and communicate science to more audiences. So I spent time working in a hands-on science museum, took a science journalism course, and eventually launched my science writing career. But even though science writing has fewer defined boundaries than the research world does, I still run into cultural norms that don’t always fit with how I view myself. For example, many journalists will tell you that their core responsibility is to inform, but not to educate, the public. I can see where the idea comes from, but I firmly believe that education is an important part of what I do. As a result, I’ve continued to keep my hand in museum or exhibit work, or I try to keep writing for children in my mix of projects. I’m not a professional educator, but if I’m doing my job well, I’m a stealth educator.

ScienceOnline 2012 provided a Science-Communication-Without-Borders experience: scientists, journalists, bloggers, educators, and many people who hyphenate those categories, all coming together to discuss issues questions and how we think about all the issues of taking the ideas we’re passionate about and bringing them to broader audiences. It’s not just that people are friendly, but by virtue of being at an Unconference and knowing the diversity of perspectives, people are set up to look at their work and assumptions from a new perspective. I’m still a journalist, but I’ve always benefited from my past and seeing the scientist side of the equation. Because I’m still an educator at heart, Science Online brings me into a fold of people who make that their life’s work.

So other than coming back to my home office with a renewed sense of enthusiasm, what did I take away from Science Online?

Nuggets of writing craft:

• In a session about assembling book research, David Dobbs (Twitter: @David_Dobbs) offered an incredibly low-tech tip for a high-tech meeting: keep a journal. At the end of each day, sum up what you’ve learned and what you found intriguing in that day’s work. Trust nothing to memory, he says, and those summaries will help you find key thematic connections.
• He and Deborah Blum (Twitter: @deborahblum) also led an amazing session about writing structure with both visual and audio analogies for crafting stories. Structure is visual, musical, and a bit like a chess game. That mix of beauty and strategy keeps me coming back every day. (If I find a link to audio or video from that session, I’ll follow up and post it).

Nuggets of Tech and Traffic:

• For techie tips from the book research session: check out Maryn McKenna‘s tumblr post here. (Twitter: @marynmck)
• Explainers, articles that offer background, are great tools for providing more context on your site. Not surprising. They’re also great tools for driving traffic. If you point out an explainer, those links get more hits. If you point out an explainer and directly encourage your reader to click on it, even better. I believe that nugget emerged from a back and forth between Maggie Koerth-Baker (Twitter: @maggiekb1) and Bora Zivkovic (also known as the Blogfather, Twitter: @BoraZ).
• The e-book world is exploding, and I love reading on my Kindle (I don’t mean that as a product endorsement. I had fun playing with my dad’s iPad over the holidays, too.). The ways for writers to publish their own work for these devices are expanding. There’s Apple’s iBooks Author, but read the fine print about being locked into their store. The Atavist, publisher of long form e-journalism, is also beta-testing software that would allow people to publish their work in any of the current e-formats. See more on that here, and learn more from this blog post by Christopher Mims over at Technology Review. (Christopher is on Twitter at @mims). The conference wiki also has an incredible list of links and information on e-book publishing.

My post conference thoughts are still simmering, but I’ll continue to use those 3 days as motivation NOT  to box myself in. And I also just solidified my connections with people I can call on when I want to think outside my comfort zone.

In the area around Crystal River, particularly this time of year, manatees huddle in the warm springs and near power plants and even around the docks and waterways. We picked a bad year to make this trip– the temperatures hovered in the 70s, balmy for December, and the manatees didn’t need to come in to shore to stay warm. We could have headed out on the water to snorkel near them, but we didn’t have time or the right gear (Next time!).

 So we did the next best thing and headed a few miles south to Homosassa Springs Wildlife Park. On the boat ride from the park entrance, our guide (whose accent indicated pointed to origins farther north, say Long Island) gave us the twisting Floridian history of this park, originally set up as an exotic animal park that including monkeys and a hippo (Lucifer, who is still in residence).

When the State of Florida took over the park, they turned it into a showcase of native animals. So in addition to the half dozen manatees, some of whom were injured and others of whom are permanent residents, we saw Florida panthers, river otters, and a whole host of cranes, flamingos and raptors.

As a Florida kid, I’d heard a lot of the manatee basics before. They’re marine mammals, slow moving, and herbivores, and they’re often injured in boating accidents. But my image of those boating accidents had always been run-ins with slashing speed boat propellers. That’s one possible injury, but the big danger is that collisions will watercraft can lead to broken ribs and punctured lungs. Unable to float (and breathe), they’ll drown. Because of their migratory patterns from the warm Florida waters in winter before ambling north, sometimes as far as New York, they aren’t bred in captivity. To maintain these patterns, captive breeding programs can’t help support the wild populations, they need to learn them in the wild.

River otter

Florida sandhill crane

Photos by Preston Foerder

Sputnik 1, the little Russian satellite that launched the space race in 1957

The American Museum of Natural History‘s new exhibit, Beyond Planet Earth, which opened last Saturday through August 12, 2012, provides a window through the past and an optimistic glimpse at the future of space exploration. As I moved through the historical portion at a press preview last Tuesday, Russian spacecraft pinged, and news reports captured the excitement and enthusiasm of historical moments, press conferences that opened up the world beyond our atmosphere.

I grew up in Florida in the Space Shuttle era, but I never saw a shuttle launch. My family tried to go once, and we thought we’d miss it because of traffic, only to arrive just in time to have the launch scrubbed seconds before scheduled liftoff. Years earlier I’d watched the TV enraptured in my elementary school library as the first Space Shuttle launched. I remember slipping on ice between two of my middle school classes  on a frigid morning in January 1986 — within a couple of hours word spread through the hallways of the Challenger explosion. So my personal piece of space nostalgia came when I walked by the case with the frangible nuts– the piece of the space shuttle that released the engine and rocket boosters and allowed the spacecraft to be reusable.

In many ways, the Space Shuttle was my window on exploration, on space, on science. The  future of understanding worlds beyond Earth seems far less focused, and though exciting and innovative, far less certain.

Sarah with the AMNH's Mars Exploration Rover

I paused at the Mars Exploration Rover long enough for a photo. Spirit and Opportunity launched the same year that I started my science writing career, and that mission marks a very personal milestone: a new career, a new adventure, a personal exploration.

But the real meat in this exhibit comes through the journey into the future, a world of Kevlar-sided Moon-homes the size of camping trailers, liquid mirror telescopes, the technology to provide enough water to drink on the Moon or beyond.

The Virgin Galactic Spaceplane: the future for astronauts and space tourists?

I had never thought about mining asteroids, but space mining for rare elements for cell phones and electronics seems plausible, maybe. After our recent near-Earth asteroid experience within the last two weeks, one interactive game that allowed me to use various strategies, bombs and mirrors to divert such disasters.

My asteroid diversions probably line up with Dennis Overbye’s inner 6-year-old boy delight at bombing Mars (see his New York Times review). The exhibit includes a touch table that allows you to terraform Mars, by building factories, setting off bombs. It took me a while to get to a point where such effects might make Mars warm enough to be comfortably habitable. And I couldn’t help but wonder, is this a good idea?

I spent the most time looking at the new Curiosity rover that’s heading to Mars next weekend and learning about the prototype for a Mars spacesuit. Dava Newman of MIT talked about the suit that uses mechanical pressure against the skin instead of a pressurized dough-boy look. The resulting suit works like high-tech athletic gear, sleek and far more streamlined for moving and climbing.

BioSuit by MIT Aeronautics

At the press conference before the  preview last Tuesday, astronaut Mike Massimino talked about his early interest in space exploration that came out of his childhood visits to the American Museum of Natural History: “There were no astronauts living on my block in Long Island.” This exhibit is a lovely tribute to explorations past and a look at the best possible future. I hope that future generations have the same chance to explore worlds beyond Earth.

Photo credits:

Sputnik: © AMNH\R. Mickens

Sarah and Rover: Carol Milano

Spaceplane and BioSuit: © AMNH\D. Finnin

This post is a part of the Chemistry Carnival hosted by Chemical & Engineering News in celebration of the International Year of Chemistry. Check there later in the week to see what others have blogged or look for the #chemcarnival hashtag on Twitter.

I spent nearly a decade of my life doing organic chemistry. Sometimes I defied the norm and carried out reactions in water. But I never quite got over my first. My first real reaction in a research laboratory was a Birch reduction.

This is a simplified scheme (and I lost my last working copy of ChemDraw when my computer before last crashed). I was doing the reaction on a steroid, converting the aromatic A ring of an estrogen to an androgen. But if you’re interested in the reaction details, other websites can tell you all you ever wanted to know about aromaticity, ammonia, lithium, and the quench with ethanol.

What sticks in my mind was the process of setting up and carrying out that reaction. I careful prepared dry glassware, I assembly of the glassware from the bottom up.  I made sure I had enough dry ice and liquid nitrogen, and made sure that the flow of nitrogen gas was both slow and steady. Most of the techniques I had to learn to run every other reaction in my chemistry career started with that Birch reduction.

I tried to be patient as ammonia gas slowly condensed in my reaction mixture. I added bits of soft lithium metal that had yielded to snips of the scissors. I watched the solution deepen to brilliant blue as unpaired electrons worked their magic. Little did I know that the rest of my chemistry career would be filled with white powders or vaguely yellow goo.

Fortunately, my adviser watched me like a hawk, making sure I didn’t quench the reaction with ethanol too soon or too quickly. I’d learn that lesson the hard way in my next laboratory, when I got impatient from waiting hours for a reaction mixture to warm to room temperature. I assume that most chemists learn the hard way at least once?

Occasionally my former chemistry colleagues and friends will ask me, “Do you miss the lab? Do you miss doing reactions?” Day-to-day, I don’t. I’m pretty happy in front of my computer. But occasionally I am nostalgic for the rhythm and physical ritual of setting up a Birch reduction. At the end of the day, I always felt satisfied that I’d both worked hard and produced a white, fluffy powder.

Image Credits: birch forest photo by tumpikuja via iStockphoto; synthetic scheme by V8rik via Wikimedia Commons

• Science career reality check: Chemjobber keeps regular tabs on the chemistry employment scene. On Tuesday, CJ offered a reality check to a recent article in Chemical & Engineering News. The good news: a departing NIH program director, John Schwab, sees the value in broader education for chemists instead of the deep specialization in, say, organic synthesis. The bad news: he seems to see hot prospects for chemists in journalism, law and policy careers. As a chemist-turned-journalist, I’ve said this more than once: this career track isn’t easier. I just happen to be having more fun than I did in the lab.
• Doping, lies and personal reflection: Last week on The Last Word on Nothing, my colleague and friend, Christie Aschwanden contributed a rich guest post about Tyler Hamilton and the bicycle doping scandal. She offers a layered personal perspective: she rode with Hamilton in college and has reported extensively on doping.
• Not quite LOLcats: Emily Anthes responds to a sly Slate slideshow about “cats of war” with her own tidbit about a short-lived cat that the CIA rigged up as a listening device in 1961. Check it out at Wonderland.
• All about authorship: Steve Silberman assembled a tremendous post: tips on writing a book from 23 authors. Great stuff in there: a great idea and a crowdsourced gift. If you could provide a universal hyperlink from a classic book to a blog post, this one calls for a link from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

Image copyright sylvia duckworth and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons License.

I’m fascinated by in-vitro meat. In part, I’m drawn in by this strange intellectual and visceral war it brings out in me. The resulting meat could eventually be tasty and environmentally sustainable. At the same time, I like good, real food. I just joined a CSA. I grow herbs and vegetables. My parents each grew up on farms. I can see where science might be able to feed people with high quality meat from a lab. But, intuitively,  my body isn’t quite sure whether I’d like it. Considering how wary I used to be of “mystery meat” in school cafeterias, it’s hard to figure out whether there’s a real future for it in supermarkets and restaurants.

I love the complex cast of characters that enter the discussion of lab-grown meat: a hodge podge of scientists from stem cell researchers to engineers, animal rights activists, chefs, food activists and sustainability experts. So Michael Specter‘s New Yorker story, “Test-Tube Burgers” was right up my geeky alley.

Lab-grown meat is a fascinating tissue-engineering problem, with all the same challenges of building organs in a laboratory for transplant. It has all the great drama of an automated architectural design challenge. What structures, conditions and chemicals do you need to allow a few seed cells to produce the marbled muscle that becomes good meat. The biggest scientific challenge is producing blood vessels to feed the tissue and create meat-like texture.

Specter’s story connects all of the threads of science, food, sustainability and even “the yuck factor” right back to the Petri dish. If you have a chance this weekend, it’s worth the read. I dare you to read it while the burgers are on the grill.

Photo Credit: stevendepolo on flickr

Where my interest in in-vitro meat began: I wrote this short item for Discover about 5 years ago.

replica of a Chauvet Cave painting from a museum in Brno, Czech Republic

I’ll admit a kind of mixed relationship with 3D movies. Done well, I love experiencing the depth, but it seems to me that 3D should be an artistic choice for its ability to convey an experience, rather than just a way to make sure that people see a movie in the movie theater.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog‘s new documentary, is the perfect match of its subject, Chauvet Cave in southern France, and the medium. A 2D film would not do this 30,000 year old cave and its intimate, yet expansive space, justice. The 3D glasses aren’t a gimmick, but a window to a moving diorama, a museum experience, a sacred journey.

This cave and its paintings were buried in rock slides thousands of years ago, only to be rediscovered about 15 years ago but closed to nearly everyone except the scientists who study it. So this space is mysterious, exclusive, and wondrous. Science meets art on every level: stalactites, stalagmites, natural artwork from above and below. But the undulating walls of these caves mesmerized me as they must have mesmerized the artists who drew on them. Cattle, bears, and even a mammoth, simple forms integrated into the movement of the walls, ancient, but fresh as if they were painted just a few years ago.

The film is an experience, well worth the money. But I found Herzog’s chosen coda to the film jarring. He talks about crocodiles that live in the warmed waters next to nearby nuclear plants. His comments were about the passage of time, how humans have changed the world and what life on earth might be like in another 30,000 years, and how those crocodiles might experience this world. Those could be worthy topics, but it’s unsatisfying information that leaves a giant question mark, with little context, at the end of a beautiful film.

With such a perfect match in the film, I’ve been thinking about subject and medium more in my work. I primarily work in printed words: the dizzying choice of nouns and verbs etches clear lines, subtly shades or brings out a new color. Words change color on radio or accompanied by video. When I spend hours in the pottery studio, I shape emerging forms from clay, add detail, think about designs on a surface.

Herzog matched his medium to an amazing subject, a cultural gift and a way to share the experience of this delicate space with a much wider audience. It’s a museum piece (in the best sense of the word) as much as a film. Ancient painters depicted their world, animating their world on a waving canvas of stone. I hope to channel an iota of that creative synergy.

Image Credit: The Adventurous Eye on flickr

Here’s a giraffe calf and mother:

Giraffes

Capybaras are the largest living rodents: there’s mom and a young upstart.

And the best for last: hippos charmed everyone who came by to visit.

Titanosaur nest

Last week, along with a group of other journalists, I got a sneak peek at The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, an exhibit that opened on April 16 at the American Museum of Natural History and will be open until January 2. This exhibit departs from the traditional dino-formula of towering skeletons by asking questions about the biology that supported the growth and maintenance of those massive bodies.

That’s not to say that there aren’t big dinosaurs. The model of the Mamenchiosaurus strains the room proportions, but the best part is her double-role as a screen for videos that describe how she breathed, the hundreds of liters of blood coursing through her body and 30-ft-long neck, and how she digested hundreds of pounds of food each day.

But though Mamenchiosaurus is daunting in size, she’s positively awe-inspiring once you get to the exhibit where you push a pump that simulates the heart that would pump her blood. I managed to keep her going for a few heartbeats, but I soon got a warning message: “The dino is dizzy.” I didn’t last much longer.

Mamenchisaurus at the AMNH's The World's Largest Dinosaurs

In a quick conversation with respiratory biologist, Dr. Steve Perry, I learned about their über-efficient lungs. Like birds, these dinosaurs likely had lungs with two chambers. As a result, they could absorb oxygen both as they inhaled and as they exhaled, boosting their ability to extract oxygen from the air to 35 percent from the 20 percent that we mere humans manage.

By making all kinds of connections to large animals that currently walk the Earth—elephants, giraffes, and even large egg-laying birds—it became a little easier to wrap my head around these large creatures roaming the Earth. It was fun to get some biology to add some meat to those bones.

More on the research that formed the basis for this exhibit in Science and in the New York Times.

Want to follow a dinosaur on Twitter? @Giant_Dino

Image credits: © AMNH/D. Finnin

Though I’d read the excerpt adapted for the New York Times magazine, picking up The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, with its regal and imposing title, was just a little intimidating. But open the first page and the language propels and compels the reader to follow the disease, its history, and those who have faced it, both doctors and patients.

This is the story of cancer infused with historical depth, scientific rigor, caring, compassion, and luscious language. Mukherjee crafts the text with such skill, infusing human stories, history, and a physician’s perspective among the timeline of cancer as it’s affected human life and health. As I worked my way through this book, I found myself underlining sentences, many of them juxtaposing the hauntingly beautiful with the terrible.

Cancer, Auerbach argued, was a disease unfolded slowly in time. It did not run, but rather slouched to its birth.

Or when describing Susan Sontag’s leukemia:

“A moody, saturnine leukemia eventually volcanoed out of Sontag’s marrow.”

Although I’ve never done cancer research, I’ve learned a lot about it in my reporting. But what I’ve learned is episodic: a cellular pathway, a policy point, or a set of treatments. This volume pulls those episodes together like jewels on a necklace, creating a comprehensive picture and an understanding of a disease that’s as powerful and compelling as the stories of the patients. Not only was this book beautiful to read, but I’ll be better at reporting about cancer because I’ve read it.

Image: Human melanoma cell dividing. Credit: Paul J.Smith & Rachel Errington. Wellcome Images