Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson: Rise of the Planet of the Insects
Anne-Sverdrup-Thygeson has made it her life’s mission to fascinate the world – with insects (Image Credit: Håkon Sparre, CC BY 2.0)
Tag Archives: communication
Why Pseudoscience Gives Me Nightmares
Whilst pseudoscience is nothing new, it seems a lot more prevalent these days. So what can the scientific community, and the public in general, do about it? (Image Credit: Becker 1999, CC BY 2.0)
Fake science – or pseudoscience – has been around forever and somehow like that really annoying guy at the party just won’t go away. How is it in an age ruled by smart phones and CRISPR sci-fi level biotech are people still buying crystals and talking about super foods (don’t get me started on Goop). While I try to adopt a Californian “you do you” attitude to almost everything, people purporting even the most innocuous pseudoscience need to be stopped by both you and me.
Prue Addison: Integrating Sustainability Into Business
Prue Addison, who spoke at the recent Norwegian Ecological Society Conference, is attempting to bring conservation science to ‘the dark side’ – the world of business (Image Credit: Synchronicity Earth, CC BY 2.0)
With the environmental movement having expanded so quickly over recent decades, it makes sense that many large corporations have started to incorporate sustainability and the environment into their business plans. But what are these business actions actually achieving? And who bridges the gap between the corporate world and the field of ecology?
At the recent Norwegian Ecological Society Conference, Tanja Petersen and I sat down with Doctor Prue Addison from the University of Oxford. Prue works with multinational corporations to aid them in integrating biodiversity considerations into their business operations. We asked her about the difference between business and academia, how she’s managed to transition between the two, and advice for others looking to make the same leap.
The Concept of Certainty in Ecological Science
Go through any scientific paper and you’ll find it littered with uncertainty. Scientists qualify parameters, give standard errors, make way for random processes even when experiments have been planned to the finest detail. Even when we get the answers we want, we provide alternative explanations that fly in the face of the assumptions we’re trying to test. Honestly, sometimes it seems like we don’t really ‘know’ anything.
I’ve written about our reluctance to declare that we know things in science before, but here I want to try and answer a couple of questions. Why is uncertainty such a crucial part of science? How does this affect the non-scientific public’s perception of science? And does this relationship with knowledge need to change in the future?
Birds are Reptiles
When one looks at birds like this puffin, it can be hard to reconcile its cute appearance with its place in the animal kingdom. The thing is, this adorable puffin has something in common with a rattlesnake, in that it’s a reptile (Image credit: Ray Hennessy CC-0).
You read that correctly, birds are reptiles. Now, I can hear you saying “but we learned that they are a different group of organisms, and that reptiles are just those scaly animals that have cold blood?” While reptiles don’t have cold blood per se, some of them DO have feathers. And can fly. In this post I hope to convince you of the fact that the puffin pictured above, and all of its avian relatives, belong with the snakes, lizards, crocodiles, and turtles in the reptile group.
Misinformation in Ecotourism: An Example from the Great Barrier Reef
Miscommunication concerning ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef can be extremely harmful to their future. I recently encountered a frustrating example of such misinformation. (Image Credit: Workfortravel, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Scientific communication is at the forefront of what we do here at Ecology for the Masses. We like to celebrate good examples of SciComm whenever we can. But every now and then it’s misused so overtly that you have to talk about it. So today I want to share a recent example of scientific communication that confused and worried me.
Celine Frere: Working With Charismatic Species
Charismatic species like the bottlenose dolphin are generally easier to find funding for. So what’s it like to work with them as a scientist. I spoke to evolutionary biologist Celine Frere to find out (Image Credit: Jason Pratt, CC BY 2.0)
