On the second Wednesday of every month, there’s a great Twitter chat on science communication in New Zealand: #SciCommNZ
Unfortunately I’m always busy on Wednesday evenings while this is going on, but I’ve tried to participate as much as I can by joining in late and reading through each discussion. The questions that have been asked have made me think about the things I write about on this blog, and some of the things I’d like to write about:
After having these thoughts churn around in my head for a few weeks, I’ve come up with something I’d like to try.
There are a lot of “everyday science” questions that I see asked and answered fairly often. Common examples include “why is the sky blue?” (which is not quite as simple as you might think) and “how do rainbows work?”. I really like these questions, but I feel sometimes like they’ve all been done many times already.
Of course, they haven’t all been done many times already. But I do feel like I see the same “everyday science” questions over and over again. I think they’re great and really interesting the first time you encounter them, so I want more.
As a remedy to this, and as an attempt to do something different and (hopefully) interesting with my science communication, I’m going to start asking some of my own everyday science questions. This might be a bit grandiose, but I’m calling this little project of mine Natural Curiousity
The format may change as I get into it, but the way I see this happening is to take every question in two parts:
First, I’ll write a post framing the question and some of my own thoughts (as a non-scientist) on what the potential answers might be, and what some problems with those potential answers might be. I want to try to do this without any Googling, but I might try a few homemade experiments. My hope would be that posts like these could get some interesting discussion going, but I guess we’ll see.
After that, I’d like to talk with someone who is an expert in a relevant topic and get their thoughts on the question, both on the potential answers brought up in the first post and on what they think the answer probably is and why. This isn’t something I’ve done before, so I hope I’ll be able to find some experts who’ll be happy to find some time to talk to me about this.
If you have any everyday science questions that you’ve been wondering about, let me know in the comments. I’ll update this post with links to posts using this format as I publish them.
Honest Universe 