Do you want to put science in the headlines?

If you do then the British Science Association Media Fellowships are for you.

Experience first-hand how science is reported by spending 3-6 weeks on a summer placement with a press, broadcast or online journalist such as the Guardian, The Times or BBC.

You will work with them to produce well informed, newsworthy pieces about developments in science.

Come away better equipped to communicate your research to the media, public and your colleagues.

You will develop writing skills that could help you produce concise and engaging articles and funding applications.

For details about the scheme, including eligibility and online application form, visit our webpage.

Application deadline: 11 March 2013

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So I was a British Science Association Media Fellow last year and had so much fun that I briefly considering changing my name and appearance so I could apply again and work at one of the other media hosts. But, unfortunately, science does not pay well enough for facial reconstructive surgery to be a viable option.

If anyone does have any questions about the scheme, please get in touch and I will be happy to help.

Faecal Transplants Through the Medium of Cartoons

Faecal transplants are highly effective in treating recurrent Clostridium difficile infections compared to conventional antibiotics. The transplants proved so successful that the trial was stopped early to give other patients the chance to benefit from this slightly icky-sounding treatment, which is proposed to repopulate the gut with good bacteria to suppress the growth of Clostridium difficile. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.

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Oh, what's that? You're confused about the dramatic change from those word-things to the above explosion of anthropomorphised microbes? So I am trying something new - cartoon-based explanations of new scientific papers (Sci-toons?). I figured there are already many, many people writing about science on the internet, but how many illustrate their articles with vaguely menacing pictures of bacteria? Not many (although maybe there's a reason for this)!

After the media fellowship

I recently finished a month-long British Science Association Media Fellowship, spending three weeks at Nature and one week at the British Science Festival in Aberdeen. I’ve talked more about my thoughts on this experience at the Wellcome Trust blog.

I’m now left wondering what on Earth I am going to do with all my newfound skillz. See, I exist at a leisurely gastropod-like pace, whereas the news media seems to be more of a fast-moving cephalopod. Science=three year deadlines that can meander off in an unexpected direction at any point; news=short window until it’s too old for anyone to really care. So using this blog to write about scientific advances (my pre-placement plan) is a pretty stupid idea unless I’m going to add something that isn’t already being said faster and better by a professional news outlet. Mollusc-based metaphors, sadly, aren’t quite enough; I think I’m going to have to develop opinions. We will see how that turns out.

Anyway, I’d recommend applying for a Media Fellowship to any scientists who are interested in how the news works. Then, you too, can be plunged into a metaphysical quandary about your place in the science media world.

Oh, and here’s my big self-aggrandising list of things what I wrote while on my media placement:

Nature News articles and blog posts:

Scientists do the wet dog shake
Nerve growth factor linked to ovulation
Helium reveals gibbon’s soprano skill
There are fewer microbes out there than you think
Resistance to backup tuberculosis drugs increases
Hepatitis C drug trial halted after patient death
Photosynthesis-like process found in insects

Research Highlights and News in Brief:

Rodent that cannot gnaw
Infection breaks truce
Inflamed guts boost bad bacteria
Cigarette smoke boosts biofilms
Hepatitis C halt
Resistance warning

Wellcome Trust Blog articles:

From growth media to news media
No such thing as a stupid question
When the drugs don't work

British Science Association website:

Stereotypes form by ‘Chinese whispers’
Sex and sewage
Cows and cars
Sensing hidden oil reserves
Shock – balanced diet is healthy!

Image: Neurons in the brain – illustration. Benedict Campbell. Wellcome Images

[Insert witty breast-related pun here]

Kate Middleton’s boobs are everywhere, both in the flesh and spirit. That sounds like the plot of a horror film in itself (“Nooooo, we’re surrounded, I’m suffocating!”). But what I really want to bring to your attention is how boobs are somehow capable of turning normal, rational people into adipose-for-brains morons. Not coming to a cinema near you - Attack of the Insidious Mind-Control Mammaries.

What is this post all about?, I here you ask. To answer that question, let’s go back more than fifteen years to when Kat (that’s me, hi everyone!) was an immature, average-looking, shy/slightly weird fourteen-year-old. Six months later, young Kat looked and acted pretty much the same apart from two not-so-small changes. And, with the materialisation of those breasts, there came a complete annihilation of teenage Kat’s faith in humanity.

Men old enough to be her father asking her out and getting angry when she politely declined, van-drivers slowing down to shout suggestions of what they wanted to do to her breasts, every tenth car holding down their horns as they passed her, wolf-whistles, strangers staring at her chest while licking their lips or nudging their mates, men ‘accidentally’ touching her on the train. Every day, all the time, until it gradually tailed off when she was around 22.

Friends were jealous, her mother answered her unease with “you should be flattered!”, other women gave her dirty looks when she inspired explicit requests from men. And it wasn't sexual harassment or, on the occasions when their hands slipped or they tripped or whatever, sexual assault. Those things were dark and menacing, confined to shadowy alleyways and drunk girls stumbling alone out of seedy bars in the early hours. Not something constant and blazon and backlit by bright daylight.

Now here's where I attempt to make my point in an oh-so-clever way. Here's a quick test: reading the above, did you think a) wow, that's shitty, b) stop exaggerating, that's ridiculous, or c) wow, it must be hard being soooo pretty. Stop boasting and get over yourself?

See my big problem isn't really with the men who thought nothing of propositioning the teenage me. What makes me unbelievably sad is all the nice, reasonable, respectful people who roll their eyes when I try to explain that there's something very wrong with society's attitudes to women. We are constantly bombarded with images of female sexual availability - advertising, music videos, daily tabloids that celebrate male achievements and female mammaries. The message is that it's OK to ogle women's bodies in public, that secretly photographing celebrities without their clothes is something that they kind of asked for when they became famous, that treating women like sexual objects when they clearly don't want to be treated that way is perfectly fine.

"So don't read The Sun," people say, failing to realise that even they have come to accept the objectification of women as not a big deal. The kind of harassment I experienced has been normalised to the point that people judge me as arrogant or boasting or, at best, overly-dramatic or a boring feminist when I try to talk about it.

I look around my train and try to work out which of the normal, polite suited-up business men, were I still a teenager, would be the ones to lose their self-control and start aggressively hitting on me. And which of the better behaved men and women would think I'd somehow asked to be harassed or would just accept it as normal.

Trying to explain to a non-believer how the over-sexualisation of women in the media harms us all is on a par with those little photos of rotten internal organs on cigarette packets. Smokers ignore the pictures, non-smokers such as myself get all worked up about all the passive smoke we may once have inhaled back when it was acceptable for people to exhale toxic chemicals on their friends. The people who need to be convinced aren’t even listening.

But when you tell me that it is natural for men to want to look at breasts, or 'jokingly' ask why I am such a man-hating feminist who wants to ban sex, or inform me that underwear adverts objectify men and it is no different, or roll your eyes and just change the subject, to me it sounds like you're basically saying that you don't think I have any reason to be upset and that I should just 'take the compliment'. That you think it's fine for certain men to treat a woman's breasts as if they are public property - whether they're a fifteen-year-old girl or the future queen.

The image at the top is borrowed from the awesome Indexed. Go check her other charts and stuff, they are very cool.

All ducks are equal but some are more equal than others

I made the worst decision of my life the other day and think the guilt will linger for at least another decade. You know those little parks you can go to which are liberally scattered with ducks? Ducks on all the ponds, ducks mingling with the sheep and random alpacas, ducks pestering visitors for food in the picnic areas? Everywhere.

So we visited one of these parks and happened upon a lost duck who’d managed to get itself separated from its flock. On one side of a small fence were ducks floating on a tranquil little pond; on the other side, quacking forlornly and pacing back and forth, was the duck in question.

“Ha ha, why doesn’t it just fly back over?” I said.

“Because it’s a duck and it’s stupid,” the boyfriend said.

Well I’d grown up with pet ducks and chickens (not literally with them. I was raised by actual humans. In a house). But, yes, I did have to agree with the boyfriend that ducks really are very stupid. Once, a fox got into our open-roofed pen and, instead of flying away, the vast majority of our ducks let themselves get eaten. See, not the cleverest members of the avian race.

So we hit on what, in retrospect, is clearly a hideously bad idea. I picked up the stupid duck and gently threw it back into the enclosure. Now, normally when you throw a duck, they flap to the ground. This one didn’t. It kind of crash-landed in the mud.

Hmmmm, I thought, its wings are clipped. Maybe it wasn’t actually meant to be in that particular enclosure…

We watched on with mounting horror as the duck metamorphosed from a cute little creature into Duckzilla the dictator duck from hell. It stormed onto the water and set about trying to KILL one of the innocent residents of the enclosure, swinging it around by the neck and basically trying to force it beneath the concentric circles of a watery doom.

“Oh no,” said the boyfriend. “What have we done?”

Before you get too upset, nothing actually died. Although I think the brutalised Mallard did look a little depressed once it had been released and had recovered from its ordeal enough to return to paddling around dibbling its beak in the (feather-strewn) water. Dictator duck then proceeded to chase the female ducks around, doing an impression of a drunk dude in a cheesy nightclub. And I have been left with the lingering guilt of knowing I have sentenced that whole flock to live under the rule of the avian reincarnation of Josef Stalin.

As I should have remembered from the childhood trauma of witnessing what tended to happen when a new duck is introduced to a flock, birds have what is cleverly termed a ‘pecking order’. This ultimately allows peaceful coexistence of everyone in the flock but, at first, there can be a bit of a power struggle while all the ducks work out who is the toughest, meanest duck that gets to boss all the others around.

See, ducks and chickens, while not being particularly intelligent as species go, do have their own little personalities. We had this one pet chicken that, over its ridiculously optimistic 15 year life, resolutely remained the grumpiest inhabitant of the hen house. It hated everything and everyone and, while all the other chickens would let me pick them up and carry them around, this one would peck anything that came close to touching it. Nothing messed with this chicken. Not even Death, it would seem, considering the fact that it managed to live nearly as long as the world’s oldest hen. This chicken was born mean and it died mean, maintaining a remarkably stable personality for all those years.

But other chickens are more pathetic. My parents had this thing for rescuing battery chickens and every year, they would introduce a few featherless, twitchy birds into the pen and we’d watch with crossed fingers to see how they’d fit in with the rest of the flock. Occasionally, there’d be one that, to heap more trauma on top of its already miserable existence, would get pecked so horribly that it would have to be separated from the others until they’d all got used to each other through a chicken-wire barrier. But, in the end, everyone would learn to get on with everyone else, and the battery chickens would grow back their patchy feathers and be less disturbing to look at.

All this has got me thinking about what kind of chicken I am. Do others size me up upon first meeting me and work out that I am very unlikely to peck them back if they try to pinch my choicest vegetable peelings? Am I destined to live out my own life being pushed around by others or can a chicken better its position in the social hierarchy? More importantly, why am I attempting to analyse my own personality based on chickens?

Giving me some hope that we don’t always need to accept our lot in life is an ambitious experiment currently being performed by my slightly mad parents. Chickens can’t exactly fly, providing a good example of how evolution can work in both directions, removing a previously successful adaptation from a species that no longer needs to use it. But my parents are attempting to teach their ex-battery hens to take to the skies using the motivation of grapes dangled from a great height. So far they’ve had moderate success although the chickens’ eyes weirdly roll over white whenever they jump, which is both strange and slightly terrifying to witness.

I think it is close to a metre off the ground. Chickens really like grapes.

Why I will always hate aphids

 

A 500-word news article on a research paper and two days to write it. You'd think it would be simple. Yeah, right. One week into my first foray into the world of science journalism and I feel like my soul has been severely paper-cut with my own poorly phrased copy.

To be fair, the majority of the responsibility for this probably lies with me. Today's Important Journalistic Lesson was how much writers have to rely on talking to the author of a paper and other experts in the field. Understanding a paper is one thing, but there's no way a normal human-being could absorb enough of the nuances of a subject area in an hour to see where it fits into the bigger picture. What might appear to be a paper about the mating dance of the Irish Pink-spotted squid could be key to the evolution of language to a squid-expert. Or the missing link! Or it could just be a paper about oddly-behaved calamari. Sometimes, the press release gives you a clue to the important take-home message of a paper. Other times, the press release is not entirely accurate. 

This is why science writers call up the author and ask them lots of questions before writing anything. Unfortunately, through a combination of French public holidays and the only author on the paper capable of answering my questions off hiking in the wilderness, I had to make do with a slight language barrier and a giant understanding barrier. And when it came to talking to other experts in the field, my two days of expert-hunting experience failed me utterly and the only person I managed to snare was fairly luke-warm about the paper, which wasn't much help.

Then the deadline caught up with me and it was all 'get it submitted', 'check the facts', 'find related articles for the website', 'work out how to use the complicated submission system', 'panic, panic, panic.' Then it was gone and I was left with a vague feeling of disquiet.

Fast forward a few days and I can see that I could have done a few things better. Such as checking that the copy-editors hadn't removed an integral "-like" from the title. Unfortunately, a few scientists who commented on the post also spotted the flaws. So we had to issue a correction. Then then someone else pointed  out a paper from April that I missed, and we had to correct something else. And I've been in a science-based sulk ever since.

What this did make me realise is that journalists sometimes get an unfairly hard time when science reporting goes a bit wrong. But it's impossible to know everything about a subject and you put a certain degree of trust in the peer review process, the authors accurately representing their work, and the press release not over-selling the importance of the results.

Where do science writers get their ideas?

I’m a week into a month-long placement in a science journalism office made up of real journalists and me – a research scientist who is rapidly learning a new respect for those who write about science in a professional capacity. In the past, I know I’ve Googled ‘where do science journalists get their ideas’ and ‘how to write about science’ and ‘what does it mean when your tongue goes green’, and this post touches on at least two of the above. Only from the point of view of someone who isn’t a professional journalist and doesn’t fully know what they are talking about. Tomorrow I will be giving advice on how to do brain surgery.

But first on to the results of my knowledge-leech/journalist-stalking behaviour...

So where do science writers get their ideas?

• Embargoed papers from the big journals which are available a few days before the papers are published. Science, Nature and PNAS are the only ones I've seen so far and a huge majority of the covered papers seem to originate in these journals. Even then, maybe only one per issue will be interesting enough to cover.
• Daily press releases from Eurekalert and other sources, which are again journalist only resources (I couldn't even register with Eurekalert because I am a working scientist and therefore deemed unworthy/untrustworthy to access embargoed papers). These lists include press releases for papers and important reports and, from what I've seen, contain a lot of dreck as well as the interesting stuff.
• Keeping an eye on the news for disease outbreaks, natural disasters, pharma company share prices, takeovers, policy info, funding announcements, politicians saying silly things about science, and many other things I am yet to fully grasp. Everyone seems to have their own area of particular interest.
• Blogs written by scientists or industry insiders can often turn up mentions of new developments in the field, or point out areas that would be worth thinking about. 
• Conferences can be a good source of soon to be published work and ideas, although some aren't open to journalists. 
• Then there are the connections journalists build up with scientists or companies, or pet subjects they've been watching for years writing for the right paper to come along. A few times, I've heard someone mention a scientist emailing them in quite a non-scientisty bout of self-promotion.
• Finally, there's trawling through next tier down journals for recently released papers that didn't send out press releases and have slipped under the radar. This is harder as generally the really world-changing stuff goes into the super-journals but I did manage to find one really interesting paper and was allowed to write a 120-word summary of it, which was cool.