The Best Australian Science Writing 2017 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1742235557 ISBN 13: 9781742235554

Verlag: NewSouth, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

The annual collection celebrating the finest voices in Australian science writing. From the furthest reaches of the universe to the microscopic world of our genes, science offers writers the kind of scope other subjects simply can't match. Good writing about science can be moving, funny, exhilarating, or poetic, but it will always be honest and rigorous about the research that underlies it. Now in its seventh year, The Best Australian Science Writing brings together knowledge and insight from Australia’s brightest thinkers as they explore the intricacies of the world around us. This lively collection of essays covers a wide range of subjects, and challenges our perceptions of the world and how we exist within it.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Slezak is a multi-award winning science and environment reporter. Since 2016 he has been reporting on environmental science and policy for the Guardian Australia. Before that he was the Australasian correspondent for New Scientist magazine, reporting on all aspects of science and its effect on the world. Prior to that, he was a medical journalist and also freelanced on a variety of topics for publications around the world. In 2017, Michael won the United Nations Associate of Australia award for reporting on climate change. In the Publishers’ Australia Awards, he won article of the year, and was runner up for journalist of the year. He has received awards for reporting on cancer and has twice been a finalist for the Eureka Prize for Science Journalism.

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The Best Australian Science Writing 2017

By Michael Slezak

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2017 University of New South Wales Press Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74223-555-4

Contents

Foreword Professor Emma Johnston, 
Introduction Michael Slezak, 
Grave Barrier Reef Jo Chandler, 
Alchemists of catastrophe: Extracting value from disasters Shanta Barley and Jessica Meeuwig Trace fossils: The silence of Ediacara, the shadow of uranium Alice Gorman, 
Fish have feelings too James Bradley, 
The machine generation Bianca Nogrady, 
Inspired by nature Laura Parker, 
An unusual pattern Joel Werner and Tiger Webb, 
Impossible alloys James Mitchell Crow, 
Alien intelligence: The extraordinary minds of octopuses and other cephalopods Elle Hunt, 
Tasmanian fires: How climate change has ravaged ancient World, 
Heritage forests Karl Mathiesen, 
Counting birds to save the Murray–Darling Ann Jones, 
An island ark Nicole Gill, 
Medicine with a bite Ivy Shih, 
What happened to climate science in the CSIRO? Adam Morton, 
Impotence and optimism: The life of a cancer scientist Darren Saunders, 
Ruffled feathers in battle to save night parrot Andrew Stafford, 
The big data telescope Elizabeth Finkel, 
Settling science: Why the scientific method confuses us Peter Ellerton, 
Testosterone rex Cordelia Fine, 
Gender equity can amplify sex differences Rob Brooks, 
Were Aboriginal Australians the first astronomers? Ray Norris, 
Ancient Aboriginal star maps shaped Australia's highways Robert Fuller, 
Antibiotic resistance Kemal Atlay, 
The furious debate over a disease that doesn't officially exist Felicity Nelson, 
Is it right to kill millions of animals if it protects others? Alice Klein, 
The mystery of the missing antimatter Cathal O'Connell, 
Do aliens have inalienable rights? Peter Singer, 
How to talk to humans in a million years Simon Torok, 
Shark alert Peter Hannam, 
Lonesome leviathans John Pickrell, 
The myth and reality of monster sharks that once ruled the seas John Long, 
The pyramid at the end of the world Elmo Keep, 
Contributors, 
Acknowledgments, 

CHAPTER 1

Grave Barrier Reef

Jo Chandler

Many of today's marine scientists blame Jacques Cousteau, who surfaced in their lounge rooms during their formative years, for luring them into the water. Others were hooked by the psychedelic barrage of coral gardens and sea creatures in National Geographic. Through the '60s and '70s, the co-evolution of scuba technology, underwater photography and colour television took millions of earthlings on their first beguiling voyage into the deep.

Until then, the submarine world was, for most people, as remote as the just-trodden Moon. For the University of Queensland's Professor Justin Marshall, however, terrestrial life was never really on the cards. His father was Dr Norman Bertram 'Freddy' Marshall, 'curator of Her Majesty's fishes' at the British Museum (Natural History), and his mother, Olga, was a scientific illustrator who captured her husband's discoveries in ink and watercolour.

Young Justin was the marine science equivalent of an army brat, floating around research bases in the Bahamas and Florida between stints at an Essex house where pickled specimens from the world's oceans were collected, lifeless and eternal, in jars.

'I was a nerdy little bugger,' Marshall recalls, 'correcting graduate students at age seven on the Latin names of fish.' Marshall grew up to become a neuro-ecologist investigating how residents of coral reefs and the deeper ocean perceive their environment.

'As arrogant humans we tend to assume we are the pinnacle of evolution; however, certainly in sensory terms, this is far from true,' he explains in his professional profile. He tells me he works with these creatures 'because I love them'. And, as it happens, they have much to teach. 'The animals I'm working on at the moment are helping us detect cancer, increase data storage on computers and improve satellite design.

All coming directly from mantis shrimp vision.'

The blue-grey surface of the ocean is a formidable barrier. But for Marshall it was always pervious. 'I've lived underwater, done two stints in the Aquarius habitat [a submerged laboratory in the Florida Keys]. I've fallen asleep underwater, which you're not supposed to do.'

On 16 March 2016 he wept underwater. 'It was on my field trip to Lizard Island. I've been going there for 30 years.' Marshall was treading water at ground zero of a global coral bleaching event – only the third ever recorded and the worst by far, all since 1998. To evoke the scene, he guides me on an imaginary walk through the loveliest forest I can conjure. But all the trees have lost their leaves. They are dying or dead and will soon start to fall down. The grasses and flowers are gone. The birds have flown away. Animals desperately search for food.

Marshall's submerged Eden is Lizard Island's Loomis Reef, 270 kilometres north of Cairns on the Great Barrier Reef. Stretching 2300 kilometres up the coast from Bundaberg to the Torres Strait, the Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on the planet, a World Heritage site cherished for its biological diversity.

But Loomis was now a slagheap. Its annihilation had been so swift that the scientist reckoned even the fish, many of them searching out their vanished food gardens, looked traumatised.

'We were diving in dissolving reef,' Marshall says. 'The water had this terrible green ghostly quality – it was like diving in ectoplasm. It was awful. And essentially it was dying coral.' Aerial surveys in April confirmed 93 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef had been hit by the bleaching to some extent.

The northern section, which because of its remoteness had endured as the most pristine, copped it the worst. In 2015, this area of the Reef was credited with saving Australia the indignity of its World Heritage treasure being declared by UNESCO as 'in danger'.

'Australia argued to UNESCO that the outstanding universal value of the World Heritage area is intact because we have this northern 30 per cent of the Reef where everything is hunky dory,' says Professor Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

'That is no longer the case. In the space of a month or two, the northern third is now more degraded than the southern two thirds.' In early May, as Canberra waited for the bell to ring on the federal election campaign, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) chairman, Dr Russell Reichelt, broke the news to a distracted Senate committee that more than half the coral in reefs in the far northern section were dead. He was unequivocal about where the blame lay. This was not the consequence of this summer's whopping El Niño, a natural warming cycle that occurs every five years or so. Bleaching was driven by 'the upward trend in ocean temperatures, which is about 1 degree [Celsius] in the past century ... It is very strongly linked to global warming.' Scientists had been warning about this eventuality for decades. In 1999, Professor Ove Hoegh- Guldberg, one of Marshall's colleagues at the University of Queensland, spelled out the scenario. He plotted the future climate if humans continued to pump out greenhouse gases against the known tolerances of coral biology, and found a wipe-out. Events as shocking as the world's first mass coral...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: NewSouth
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1742235557
• ISBN 13: 9781742235554
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Herausgeber: Slezak Michael
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland