Kiwi scientists blogging up a storm

BY HELEN HARVEY

Did you know that most banknotes in the United Kingdom have traces of cocaine on them?

It's true. Apparently paper money in Britain is made of paper, unlike in Australia and New Zealand where the notes are made of plastic.

Anyway, in the UK, the notes are put in between two heated blocks, which evaporates whatever is on the surface and that is analysed by a machine. Money hasn't been tested like that here because it would melt.

They didn't have paper (or plastic) New Zealand banknotes in 1856, but there was scarlet fever. It is shown on a map that highlights disease. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that New Zealand even appeared on a world map in 1856.

These tidbits are the subjects of blogs on the website sciblogs.co.nz, which was set up in October by Science Media Centre manager Peter Griffin and now features about 29 bloggers writing on all things scientific.

A couple of bloggers are science writers who are not scientists, but they cover their area well, Griffin says. The rest are from universities, Crown Research Institutes and private scientific organisations. One of the latter is Anna Sandiford, an independent forensic scientist who blogged about the cocaine-riddled banknotes.

That blog came about after she read that British banknotes are contaminated by cocaine. She was surprised it was regarded as news. Working in forensic science for 12 years, she had heard it all before.

Blogging "stops you feeling isolated and gives you a chance to interact with other scientists who work in something other than forensic science," she says. "You can get tunnel vision if you stay in one area."

Waikato University biology lecturer Alison Campbell works in biology and evolution and blogs for secondary-school biology students, especially those taking scholarship exams. She calls it BioBlog.

It's hard for those kids and their teachers because there's not a lot of resources for them, she says.

"I write about a whole pile of stuff, almost always about biology in one way or another, except when cats come into it."

She uses pictures of cats with scientific captions added to get her points across.

"I focus on evolutionary biology because it is an interesting line. I talk about pseudoscience. I talk about how to sit exams and what life is like at university."

When Sciblogs was created, Campbell was invited to syndicate her blog across to the new website.

One of her blogs pictured a cartoon frog and a joke about a wide-mouthed frog. It began "Frogs' mouths are quite interesting, actually."

Her aim is to write stories that are quirky and eye-catching, to draw people in, she says. "I try to write stuff that anybody can access and think: OK, science is really cool."

Science does have a bit of an image problem, she says.

"If you ask schoolkids . . . to draw what they think a scientist is like, it will be some old guy in a white coat with bad hair. And explosions."

And scientists aren't very good at explaining things, she says. "You only have to look at the furore surrounding the whole global warming thing to see that. Scientists have not been good at getting the science across, which I think is a real pity."

A post last week was about a product that Campbell calls pseudoscience - some "quackery" that is sold as a supplement to cure a number of illnesses. It's basically swimming-pool water, she says.

The Sunday Star-Times had an article that was quite critical of this supplement, so Campbell blogged on the scientific reasons why the stuff doesn't work.

One of the reasons Sciblogs was set up was to give scientists a platform where they can discuss big issues in the news that are science-related in greater depth than the mainstream media can go into in a short news article, Griffin says.

"We were coming across a lot of scientists who we were dealing with [through the Science Media Centre] who wanted to get into science communication, but weren't really all that comfortable doing radio or TV or even print interviews, but wanted a regular place where they could explore their area of expertise. A blog seemed like a good way to do it."

So he found a bunch of scientists who had set up their own blogs and invited some scientists who hadn't blogged before and put them all under a one banner.

"It's really starting to take off. Our stuff is now going on Google news so it's getting picked up easier in search engines. At the moment we have between 1000 and 1500 people using it a day."

Half of the visitors are from New Zealand - institutions, government and private people - and half are international.

"The good thing is we have people covering the entire spectrum and we didn't realise how prolific they would be . . . We are getting five or six new stories every day, so there isn't pressure on any one particular writer to be prolific. We've enough new content going up there every day to keep people coming back for more."

Griffin is looking for a scientist whose speciality is agriculture. There are some big issues in agriculture, such as the indoor dairying proposal in the Mackenzie Country and where New Zealand is going with agricultural emissions, he says.

The blogs aren't always contentious or newsy. Some are about obscure parts of the bloggers' research, Griffin says.

"And that is attracting quite a lot of attention as well. There is all sorts of quirky stuff on there that gets a surprisingly large amount of traffic."

Climate change is topical at the moment, he says. So the people who are writing about that, such as Dr Grant Jacobs, are really popular.

Jacobs is a consultant who works in computational biology.

"It's a mix of biology, computer science and the specialist knowledge of the particular problem you're working on. Basically you're a specialist theoretical biologist using computer science as the means to do your biology," Jacobs says.

He works in molecular biology and genetics, does data analysis and writes computer software.

"One thing that surprised me when I started blogging the computational biology stuff was that far more [people] read it than if I put the equivalent out in an academic paper. A lot more people see them. So I've recycled some old articles. I was quite surprised how many people read them."

But sometimes he needs a break and blogs about quirky stuff, like ancient science textbooks and old maps that highlight diseases.

"I like little bits that touch on quirky points. I try to weave a concept or thought in. A lot of people don't appreciate how much disease was around, because we don't have it now. I got it off a blog I follow in New York. He is a follower of old maps."

Bloggers often pass on what they've read on other blogs and add their own contribution to it, their own angle, he says.

"I enjoy writing them. I try not to write too much. I can't quite understand the issue of writer's block," he says, laughing. "You just write. There's always more material than you can possibly do, anyway."

- © Fairfax NZ News