by Heidi Norman
BIANCA NOGRADY is a freelance science journalist, broadcaster and author, who is yet to meet a piece of scientific research she doesn’t find fascinating. In more than a decade of freelance reporting, she has written for publications including Scientific American, Nature, The Australian, Ecos, Australian Doctor, Medicine Today and the ABC’s health, science and environment websites, covering everything from nanomedicine and penis size to quantum physics and supernovae. She is author of The End: The human experience of death, which attempts to answer the questions we have about death but are too afraid to ask. She also co-authored The Sixth Wave: How to succeed in a resource-limited world.
EDITED BY
BIANCA NOGRADY
For all those who never stop asking ‘why?’, including my children Nina and Pascal.
And for my husband Phil; my answer.
A NewSouth book
Published by
NewSouth Publishing
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA
newsouthpublishing.com
© University of New South Wales Press Ltd 2015
First published 2015
This book is copyright. While copyright of the work as a whole is vested in University of New South Wales Press Ltd, copyright of individual chapters is retained by the chapter authors. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Title: Best Australian science writing 2015 / Bianca Nogrady.
ISBN: 9781742234410 (paperback)
9781742247571 (epdf)
9781742242231 (ebook)
Subjects: Technical writing – Australia.
Communication in science – Australia.
Science in literature.
Other Creators/Contributors: Nogrady, Bianca, editor.
Dewey Number: 808.0665
Design Josephine Pajor-Markus
All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The editor welcomes information in this regard.
Contents
Foreword
Adam Spencer
Introduction: The ‘who’ behind the ‘why’
Bianca Nogrady
All dressed up for Mars and nowhere to go
Elmo Keep
The vanishing writers
Fiona McMillan
I, wormbot: The next step in artificial intelligence
Gillian Terzis
It’s all in your mind: The feeling of ‘wetness’ is an illusion
Jesse Hawley
Love bug
Wendy Zukerman
Light
Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax
Playing God
Bridie Smith
Job description
Alice Gorman
The past may not make you feel better
Christine Kenneally
Maths explains how lobsters swim
Clare Pain
Global ‘roadmap’ shows where to put roads without costing the earth
William Laurance
Messages from Mungo
John Pickrell
Uncharted waters
Daniel Stacey
Field guide to the future
Ian Lunt
How I rescued my brain
David Roland
Small mammals vanish in northern Australia
Dyani Lewis
Will a statin a day really keep the doctor away?
Elizabeth Finkel
An uneasy alliance: Our debt to tools and their persistence in our nightmares
Elizabeth Bryer
Aliens versus predators: The toxic toad invasion
Michael Slezak
What shall we teach the children
George Clark
Why aren’t we dead yet?
Idan Ben-Barak
Robots on a roll
James Mitchell Crow
Honest placebos
Jane McCredie
Imagine there’s new metrics (it’s easy if you try)
Jenny Martin
The women who fell through the cracks of the Universe
Lauren Fuge
Beating the odds
Trent Dalton
Where’s the proof in science? There is none.
Geraint Lewis
Germ war breakthrough
John Ross
Lost in a floral desert
Manu Saunders
Revisiting Milgram’s shocking obedience experiments
Nick Haslam and Gina Perry
Social robots are coming
Wilson da Silva
How dust affects climate, health and … everything
Tim Low
Copulate to populate: Ancient Scottish fish did it sideways
John Long
The mind of Michio Kaku
Tim Dean
Advisory panel
Contributors
Acknowledgments
The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing
The Bragg UNSW Press Student Prize for Science Writing
Foreword
Adam Spencer
My love of numbers began way, way back.
Certainly as far back as second grade at Boronia Park Infants School in Sydney under the sagacious tutelage of Ms Russell.
Ms Russell was awesome. I can say without fear of contradiction that she had a great influence on my academic life and I’m sure she had a tremendous impact on the lives of countless other kids over the years.
Big call for a kid who was seven at the time but one I make confidently.
You see, speaking of confidence, as a young ’un I don’t recall being short of it. I didn’t take to calling my self ‘The Spence’ until a good 25 years had passed, but if giving yourself a third person nickname had been the done thing in 1976 I imagine I’d have been way up for it.
The Spence Jr loved his maths. He loved times tables: ‘Miss, why do we stop at the 12s?’, he lived for addition algorithms, and just the promise of one day doing long division drew him like a nerdy moth to a geeky flame.
But therein lay the problem. It’s fair to say I loved my maths a fair bit more than the average seven-year-old in class 2R Boronia Park 1976. And while I thought I was helping by offering to answer every question, and while I thought I had a right to be aggrieved when Ms Russell could clearly see my hand up but refused to acknowledge me, even though I’d answered the last seven questions correctly and was therefore a pretty safe option for question number eight, in fact, I wasn’t really helping anyone. I had become what primary school teachers euphemistically describe as ‘that kid’.
It was into this swirling world of confusion and frustration that Ms Russell strode one lunchtime as she took me aside and uttered words that would change my life forever.
‘Adam, after lunch we’re going to try these ten sums in the book. I bet that if instead of coming to class, you went to the library, you wouldn’t be able to finish all 50 questions in the chapter, in the time it takes us to do ten.’
This challenge was like a red rag to a very nerdy seven-year-old bull. As the bell rang I raced to class, gathered my textbook, exercise book and not one, but two trusty HB pencils (you always have to build in a protection against system failure) and pounded down to the library as fast as my chubby l
egs would carry me. ‘You just watch me, Ms Russell.’
I finished the 50 questions in a whirl of delight and got back to room 2R just as the class was wrapping up problem number ten. I waited until the next break in class, quietly put my 50 answers on Ms Russell’s desk: ‘Don’t worry Miss, I’ve checked them’ (I was SUCH a nerd) and resumed my seat.
This intervention by Ms Russell channelled my atavistic desire for arithmetic in a way that didn’t distract the class, and it was sheer genius – a perfect example of great teaching. The right tool for the right student (who might have unwittingly been a bit of a tool himself) at exactly the right time.
My love for numbers was set for life.
Fast forward 20 years and another seminal moment. I suddenly had the realisation, midway through attempting a PhD in pure mathematics, that while in a room full of randomly selected people I’m a ‘maths genius’, in a room of Pure Maths PhDs … I’m as dumb as a box of spoons. It simply wasn’t the gig for me.
What I did realise though was that for every genuine maths genius, or world-class biologist, or astronomer royale, there is a role for public lovers of science and champions of the cause. Roles for people like me to take these discoveries, these understandings, these brilliantly framed questions and tell the world why they are important.
Please don’t misinterpret me. I’m not suggesting that most of these assembled authors are, in certain contexts, as dumb as boxes of cutlery. I wholly reserve that title for myself. In fact, some of them are both researchers and great communicators. To them I say ‘pull your head in pal – no one likes an overachiever’.
Dive on in and soak up what the best of the best have penned for 2015.
And Ms Russell, if you’re reading this, thanks.
Introduction:
The ‘who’ behind the ‘why’
Bianca Nogrady
What a fabulous job it is to write about science. We get to gatecrash laboratories, hospitals, field sites, boardrooms, workshops, expeditions and zoos; peering over shoulders, pointing at complex bits of science and asking, ‘so, what does that do?’
We rock up at that brilliant moment when a scientist’s lifetime pursuit of an unseen goal finally delivers. We get to enjoy their ‘eureka!’ moment without having been there for all those years of laborious, painstaking persistence and drudgery; without having seen them crumple when a trial failed, an experiment delivered a dud result, or a patient died.
But the ‘eureka’ moment, while exciting and definitely newsworthy, is not what makes a great science story.
Science is most often talked about in terms of the end results; a new compound developed or creature discovered, a star revealed or disease diagnosed. But far more interesting are the personalities behind those results and their journey.
Those who work in and around the sciences are a passionate, dedicated lot. They have to be, for what else would drive someone to spend a lifetime searching for the answer to a single, focused question; not knowing if they’ll ever find that answer, not knowing if the answer will be ‘no’, or if they’re even asking the right question.
Their stories are what capture the heart and the imagination of a reader.
Like the developer Gillian Terzis meets, whose robotic Lego nematode wanders aimlessly around the floor of his office, or the wild-haired theoretical physicist who challenges Tim Dean to question the nature of consciousness.
It’s the story of the zoo CEO Bridie Smith meets, whose recurring darkest-before-dawn fear is that one day she will hold the last living Tasmanian devil in her arms as it is euthanised. It’s the mathematician delighted to have answered the very biological question of how lobsters Mexican-wave themselves around the ocean floor, as Clare Pain reports.
Sometimes we, the writers, become part of the story and enjoy our own little ‘eureka’ moment, as Fiona McMillan does when she begins to wonder at the mysterious artists behind the squiggles on a beloved scribbly gum. It can be an odd moment of unexpected revelation, as Michael Slezak discovers when he realises he may yet learn to love the cane toad.
And sometimes the story is about what goes on between the lines, off-camera, behind closed doors. Lauren Fuge draws back the curtain on the forgotten ranks of women who contributed so much to the field of astronomy yet have been consigned to the shadows. Elmo Keep scratches at the bright, shiny surface of the Mars One project and finds that the questions far outnumber the answers.
Where there are scientists, there are subjects. They may be virulent single-celled pathogens on a collision course with the Next Big Antibiotic, as John Ross describes, in which case we harbour little sympathy for their demise. But they may also be individuals whose medical misfortune has thrust them into a world they would gladly have avoided.
Similarly here, the simple physiology of a subject’s condition, and the steps taken to address it, are of minor interest. It’s their journey, their story that sings loudly from the page; like the man desperately searching for a cure for the genetic disease that has claimed his mother and will soon claim him. A cure may arrive too late for him, as Christine Kenneally describes, but he labours on in the hope it may save others.
It’s not always a good thing to be the subject of a piece of science writing, especially medical writing. Usually it means something unpleasant has happened to you. As writers, we are in the unique position of being able to articulate more clearly than most what this is like, as David Roland does in offering a gripping insight into the first bewildering days after his stroke.
* * * * *
It is the right of every anthology editor to talk about how high the quality of entries were and how difficult it was to make a decision about the final list.
But it is also a privilege to be contractually obliged to sit still and read a truckload of articles about science and scientists. I don’t get to do it often, and it reveals some interesting patterns.
Where the 2014 anthology featured a number of articles on our changing climate and its repercussions, this year there were an overwhelming number of submissions about our vanishing biodiversity, and what could be or is being done about it.
It suggests a shift away from the big picture catastrophe of climate change – in the face of which many of us feel utterly powerless – towards a more specific and manageable concern about the less adaptable of our fellow inhabitants of this planet; what we have done to them, and what we might do to help them.
There were also a number of articles exploring the rapidly evolving field of robotics and artificial intelligence. We may be mired in the impending catastrophe of climate change, habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, but our capacity for innovation and imagination is as robust as ever, particularly in Australia.
Despite being a relatively small nation, we have long held our own in the global science and technology arena. Many of the pieces in this anthology, such as Trent Dalton’s piece on the pulseless artificial heart and James Mitchell Crow’s exploration of the advances in field robots, are testament to Australian scientific innovation, and determination.
Notwithstanding the profound economic and societal benefits that flow from such innovation, it is especially gratifying for a science writer to be able to write about the scientific achievements of one’s home team. May we look forward to many more such success stories in future anthologies.
All dressed up for Mars and nowhere to go
Elmo Keep
Josh sat cross-legged on the floor in his parents’ neat, suburban home in Perth, enraptured. It was May 1996 and Andy Thomas had just stepped out of the space shuttle Endeavour and onto the tarmac of Runway 33 of the Kennedy Space Center. In his flight suit, bright orange against the blue of the sky, he talked in his clipped and measured British-sounding tones about seeing his hometown of Adelaide from the God-like vantage of space. These TV images would stick in Josh’s mind like gum to a boot sole. He was ten years old.
Josh thought that could be him someday, speaking before the world’s media, beaming out o
f everyone’s television. He wanted then only one thing out of life: to be an astronaut.
Now Josh is 29. He has been a member of the Royal Marine Commandos. An engineer. A physicist. A blast specialist, a mining technician and, briefly, a scuba instructor. He is also a part-time stand-up comedian, playing Keith, a foulmouthed, sociopathic koala, who provides Josh a remove to exorcise a few of his demons. It’s a weird show.
One day in 2012, Josh was sitting in a coffee shop when he came across a call for volunteers for a fledgling space program. There was just one catch. The mission was one-way.
To Mars.
This was his shot. Josh filled out the application form. Could he describe a time when he had been scared? Stressed? Why was it important the mission be one-way?
He paid the registration fee, uploaded a video explaining why he should be chosen and hit send.
Then he waited.
* * * * *
Mars One, a private, not-for-profit company in Holland, might have come to your attention when it announced it had received more than 200 000 applications for the chance to be the first human on the surface of Mars.
Despite not being a space-faring agency, it claims that by 2025 it will send four colonists to the planet. Ultimately, it says, there will be at least six groups of four, a mix of men and women, who will train on Earth for ten years until they are ready to be shot into space, never to return.
It estimates the mission will cost only $6 billion: tens, if not hundreds, of billions less than any manned Mars mission proposed by NASA. Mars One admits it is ‘not an aerospace company’ and ‘will not manufacture mission hardware’: ‘All equipment will be developed by third-party suppliers and integrated in established facilities.’ That’s how it will keep costs down, by outsourcing everything to private enterprise.
It is open to anyone. These volunteers don’t have to have any special qualifications – no PhDs in aeronautics, no degrees in advanced physics. They need only be in robust physical health, and willing to undertake the extremely risky mission. As the proposed program progresses, they will have to prove themselves adept and nimble learners, able to amass an enormous amount of knowledge, not only in the high-pressure intricacies of spaceflight, but also in rudimentary surgery and dentistry, recycling resources and taking commands, in order to maintain a harmonious team dynamic for the rest of their natural lives.