The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 Read online

  THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2012

  ELIZABETH FINKEL holds a PhD in biochemistry and spent ten years as a professional research scientist before becoming an award-winning journalist. She has written for Science, The Lancet, Nature Medicine, New Scientist and The Age, among others, and has broadcast for ABC Radio National. She is the author of Stem Cells: Controversy at the Frontiers of Science and The Genome Generation.

  THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2012

  EDITED BY ELIZABETH FINKEL

  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 2012

  First published 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  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: The best Australian science writing 2012/Elizabeth Finkel

  ISBN: 9781742233482(pbk)

  9781742241296(ebook)

  9781742243825(mobipocket)

  9781742246192(epdf)

  Subjects: Technical writing – Australia.

  Communication in science – Australia.

  Science in literature.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Finkel, Elizabeth.

  Dewey Number: 808.0665

  Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

  Printer Griffin Press

  This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

  This project has been assisted by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

  Contents

  The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing

  Advisory panel

  Contributors

  Foreword: A new era for science writing

  Brian Schmidt

  Introduction: Masters of the popular treatise

  Elizabeth Finkel

  Gateway to heaven

  Wilson da Silva

  Neutrinos and the speed of light … not so fast

  Jonathan Carroll

  Blank canvas

  Corey Butler

  Under the hood of the universe

  Margaret Wertheim

  The ill-effects of quackery v scientific evidence

  Cassandra Wilkinson

  A hero’s legend and a stolen skull rustle up a DNA drama

  Christine Kenneally

  The rise and fall of infant reflux

  Pamela Douglas

  Earthquakes: When the world moves

  Emma Young

  Seven billion reasons to be a feminist

  Rob Brooks

  Balancing act

  Adrian Hyland

  Under the influence

  Frank Bowden

  Why clever people believe in silly things

  Craig Cormick

  Painting the rainforests REDD

  William Laurance

  The evolution of the inadequate modern male

  Peter McAllister

  A wee solution

  Lachlan Bolton

  Diamond planets, climate change and the scientific method

  Matthew Bailes

  Storm front

  Jo Chandler

  I want to play video games when I grow up (and so should you)

  Michael Kasumovic

  Licence to heal

  Nick Miller

  Secret life of Enceladus

  Richard A. Lovett

  The roach’s secret

  Wendy Zukerman

  Australia in 2050

  Julian Cribb

  Doctor’s orders: Debunking homeopathy once and for all

  I an Musgrave

  The Aussie mozzie posse

  Ashley Hay

  Life in Lake Vostok? The link between Antarctica and extra-terrestrials

  Helen Maynard-Casely

  The doctor is in

  Ranjana Srivastava

  A dream of goldfinches

  Vanessa Mickan

  Acknowledgments

  In 2012, NewSouth Publishing launched a new annual prize for the best short non-fiction piece on science written for a general audience. The Bragg UNSW Press Prize is named in honour of Australia’s first Nobel Laureates, William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg. The Braggs won the 1915 Nobel Prize for physics for their work on the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays. Both scientists led enormously productive lives and left a lasting legacy. William Henry Bragg was a firm believer in making science popular among young people, and his Christmas lectures for students were described as models of clarity and intellectual excitement.

  The Bragg UNSW Press Prize is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. The winner receives a prize of $7000 and two runners-up each receive a prize of $1500. The shortlisted entries for this year’s inaugural prize are included in this anthology.

  The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing 2012

  Shortlist

  Jo Chandler, Storm front

  Wilson da Silva, Gateway to heaven

  Ashley Hay, The Aussie mozzie posse

  Peter McAllister, The evolution of the inadequate modern male

  Nick Miller, Licence to heal

  Wendy Zukerman, The roach’s secret

  Winners will be announced on 22 November 2012 at newsouthpublishing.com/scienceprize

  Judges of the Bragg UNSW Press Prize 2012

  Professor Bryan Gaensler, University of Sydney

  Professor Martin Green, UNSW

  Professor Marilyn Renfree, University of Melbourne

  Professor Nadia Rosenthal, Monash University

  Dr Elizabeth Finkel, Editor,

  The Best Australian Science Writing 2012

  Jane McCredie, Publisher, NewSouth Publishing

  Advisory panel

  PROFESSOR BRYAN GAENSLER is an award-winning astronomer and best-selling author who is internationally recognised for his groundbreaking work on interstellar magnets and cosmic explosions. A former Young Australian of the Year and Harvard professor, Gaensler is currently a Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney, where he directs the Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics. He is the author of Extreme Cosmos (NewSouth 2011).

  PROFESSOR MARTIN GREEN is a Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales and Executive Research Director of the University’s Photovoltaic Centre of Excellence. His work has resulted in many major international awards, including the 2002 Right Livelihood Award, commonly known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, the 2007 SolarWorld Einstein Award and the 2010 Eureka Prize for Leadership. In 2012, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of his contributions to photovoltaics and to photovoltaic education.

  PROFESSOR MARILYN RENFREE is a reproductive and developmental biologist and Secretary, Biological Sciences, and Vice President, of the Australian Academy of Science. She has held NHMRC, ARC, Fulbright, Ford Foundation and Royal Society fellowships. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Laureate Professor of the University of Melbourne, and was an ARC Federation Fellow between 2003 and 2008 and Director of the ARC Cent
re of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics from 2008 to 2010.

  PROFESSOR NADIA ROSENTHAL is a molecular biologist and Founding Director of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University and Scientific Head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Australia. She obtained her PhD in 1981 from Harvard Medical School, where she directed a biomedical research laboratory, serving for a decade at the New England Journal of Medicine as editor of the Molecular Medicine series. She headed the EMBL-Rome campus from 2001 to 2012 and held a Professorship of Cardiovascular Science at Imperial College, London. Professor Rosenthal is an NHMRC Australia Fellow.

  Contributors

  MATTHEW BAILES is an astrophysicist who is an expert at finding rapidly spinning relativistic stars known as millisecond pulsars and is currently the acting Deputy Vice Chancellor at Swinburne University of Technology.

  LACHLAN BOLTON is a Year 6 student from Redeemer Baptist School North Parramatta. Fresh from consecutive prizes in the national Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards, he penned his light-hearted essay on the Wee-Cam. It was the winning entry in CSIRO’s The Helix ‘What’s The Solution?’ writing competition, and yes, he is currently constructing his own Wee-Cam.

  FRANK BOWDEN is Professor of Medicine at the Australian National University Medical School and is an infectious diseases physician at the Canberra Hospital. His research interests range from HIV to head lice and have focused on public health approaches to the control of infections in the community. He is the author of Gone Viral: The germs that share our lives.

  ROB BROOKS is director of the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. He is an internationally recognised expert on evolutionary biology and sexual conflict, and received the Australian Academy of Science’s Fenner Medal. He wrote Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern World.

  COREY BUTLER is a former COSMOS Magazine art director, whose stories, photographs and illustrations have been published in the Sydney Morning Herald and QANTAS’ inflight magazine, The Australian Way. Corey has received a Publishers Australia Excellence award for design and was a Walkley Award finalist.

  JONATHAN CARROLL completed his PhD in theoretical physics in 2009, and has since held a Research Associate position with the Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter at the University of Adelaide.

  JO CHANDLER is a Walkley award-winning journalist and senior writer with The Age, writing in-depth reports across a range of issues, with particular emphasis on communicating climate change science and its impacts; humanitarian aid and development; women’s issues and human rights. Her book Feeling the Heat takes the form of a reporter’s dispatches from the climate ‘front line’, from Antarctica to the tropics.

  CRAIG CORMICK is a Canberra-based science communicator, and an award-winning author, who specialises in drivers of public attitudes towards contentious technologies. He prefers to tell people he studied at The Derek Zoolander Centre for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too.

  JULIAN CRIBB is an author, journalist, editor and science communicator. He is principal of Julian Cribb & Associates, which provides specialist consultancy in the communication of science, agriculture, food, mining, energy and the environment. He has received 32 awards for journalism. His internationally acclaimed book The Coming Famine explores the question of whether we can feed humanity through the mid-century peak in numbers and food demand.

  PAMELA DOUGLAS is a GP, researcher and writer. She has been in general practice since 1987, and is now Director of Possums, The Clinic for Mothers and Babies, in Brisbane. She is also an adjunct Senior Lecturer with the Discipline of General Practice, at the University of Queensland.

  ASHLEY HAY has written four books of narrative non-fiction and a novel, The Body in the Clouds, which was long-listed for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A former literary editor of The Bulletin, her work has appeared in publications including Australian Geographic, The Australian, The Monthly, Good Weekend, Griffith Review and The Guardian.

  ADRIAN HYLAND is the award-winning author of Diamond Dove, Gunshot Road and Kinglake-350. He lives in St Andrews, northeast of Melbourne, and teaches at LaTrobe University.

  MICHAEL KASUMOVIC is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow working at the University of New South Wales. His research program revolves around sex and evolution, and explores how individuals maximise fitness in a continually varying world. Although his research focuses on non-human animals, he aims to also better understand humans.

  CHRISTINE KENNEALLY is an award-winning journalist and author. She has written for The Monthly, Good Weekend, The New Yorker and other publications. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, was published by Penguin. She is 2.7% Neanderthal.

  WILLIAM LAURANCE, Distinguished Research Professor at James Cook University in Cairns, is one of the world’s leading researchers in tropical forest conservation. He works in the Amazon, Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia, and has written six books and over 350 articles. He has received many honours, including the prestigious Heineken Environment Prize.

  RICHARD A. LOVETT is a former law professor turned freelance writer whose stories have appeared in COSMOS Magazine, Nature, Science, New Scientist and many others. He is also an award-winning science fiction writer and a distance-running coach for athletes ranging from local competitors to Olympic Trials contestants.

  PETER MCALLISTER is an archaeologist and anthropologist from Griffith University’s Gold Coast Campus. His major research interests are human evolution and the physical anthropology of ancient hominins, and he likes to write funny, informative books about the anthropology of the human condition. Outside his science writing, McAllister has worked as a journalist, a graphic artist, an advertising salesman for a country music radio station, and once (almost) as a Chinese-speaking rugby league commentator.

  HELEN MAYNARD-CASELY is a scientist working at the Australian Synchrotron, often attempting to re-create the conditions on the surface of Europa. When she isn’t attempting to be on another planet, she likes eating jelly babies, watching sunsets and singing very badly.

  VANESSA MICKAN is a freelance writer and editor born in Brisbane and educated in Sydney. Vanessa suspected woodpeckers were just cartoon characters until she moved to Connecticut and started birdwatching. At birdsandlife.blogspot.com she writes about walking in the woods, the birds she sees there and the thoughts that unspool in those quiet moments.

  NICK MILLER is a freelance journalist currently based in New York. He left Australia in 2011 after eight years at The Age newspaper in Melbourne as its state news editor, health editor and IT editor. He started his reporting career at The West Australian newspaper, and has also written drama for radio and stage.

  IAN MUSGRAVE is a neuropharmacologist at the University of Adelaide. He is interested in understanding neurodegeneration, and neuronal function and survival, as well as natural product pharmacology and drug design. He is also interested in science communication (he is a committee member of SA Science Communicators) and is an avid amateur astronomer.

  BRIAN SCHMIDT is an ARC Laureate and Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to ‘the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae’. He is currently leading Mt Stromlo’s effort to build the SkyMapper telescope, a new facility that will provide a comprehensive digital map of the southern sky from ultraviolet through near infrared wavelengths. In addition to his astronomical studies, Schmidt runs a small vineyard and winery in the Canberra District, specialising in Pinot Noir.

  WILSON DA SILVA is the Editor-in-Chief of COSMOS Magazine. A former foreign correspondent for Reuters, he’s been a science reporter for ABC TV, a correspondent for New Scientist, and editor of the magazines Newton, 21C and Science Spectra. He began his journalism career at the Sydne
y Morning Herald and later worked as a technology writer for The Age. The winner of 31 awards, including twice Editor of the Year for his work on COSMOS Magazine, he is also a former president of the World Federation of Science Journalists.

  RANJANA SRIVASTAVA is an oncologist and author from Melbourne. A Fulbright scholar, she has written widely on the subject of humanity in medicine. Her book Tell Me The Truth: Conversations With My Patients About Life and Death was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award. She writes a regular column in The Melbourne Magazine.

  MARGARET WERTHEIM is Director of the Institute for Figuring, a Los Angeles-based organisation dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics. She has authored three books on the cultural history of physics and has written for many publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Scientist and The Guardian.

  CASSANDRA WILKINSON has worked for public, private and non-profit organisations developing and advising on social policy, and is currently National Business Development Manager for Social Finance, a start-up company developing one of Australia’s first Social Impact Bonds. She is a co-founder and President of FBi Radio and author of Don’t Panic – Nearly Everything is Better than You Think (Pluto Press 2007) and has contributed chapters to Happiness (Spinney 2009) and Right Social Justice (Connor Court 2011).

  EMMA YOUNG is an award-winning science and health journalist, and was named Australian Health Journalist of the Year 2010. A contributing editor at COSMOS Magazine, she also writes regularly for Australian Geographic and New Scientist, and is the author of five novels and three non-fiction books.

  WENDY ZUKERMAN is a researcher for Catalyst at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She graduated from Biomedical Science/Law (Hons) at Monash University in Melbourne in 2008. Before working at Catalyst, Wendy was the Asia Pacific reporter for New Scientist. She appears on ABC and local radio to discuss science news and tweets @wendyzuk.

  Foreword:

  A new era for science writing

  Brian Schmidt

  It has never been a better time to be a consumer of scientific information. Thanks to the internet, we have an embarrassment of riches. Aficionados can help themselves to data from NASA satellites and seismic arrays, and to huge databases of information throughout the biological sciences. The broader community is even being encouraged to participate in citizen science activities such as the Galaxy Zoo or SETI Live. Scientists and scientific organisations are also reaching out with Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and Google Circles. YouTube provides a mind-boggling array of video material – everything from professional scientific presentations to the self-documented experiments of children. There are more science podcasts published each week than can be listened to by the keen listener in the available 168 hours.