Torque – Revolving Ideas @ QTLC

In further adventures into public lectures, this evening I attended a lecture run at the Questacon Technology Learning Centre (QTLC). For those who don’t know, Questacon is the National Science and Technology Centre in Australia – and it’s really awesome. The Questacon Technology Learning Centre is kind of an offshoot of Questacon. It contains the workshop, where they build all the exhibits for the centre, but also a workshop area where classes or groups can have… well… workshops, where you can build things for yourself.

But today we were at QTLC for a public lecture as part of the lecture series “Torque – Revolving Ideas”. And today’s lecturer was Dr Graham Walker, rather well known around the SciComm circuit for his science shows. However, lecture is a bit of a misleading word in this case. In this environment you could be forgiven for thinking your ‘lecture’ was you chatting to a friend while sitting in your backyard shed.

This lecture was much more in my comfort zone content-wise than yesterday. Having a background in Science Communication, as well as spending this year doing science shows in schools around the country, I found Dr Walker’s lecture not only interesting but also helpful for my own work.

Dr Walker’s talk focused around the evolution of his props for his demonstrations over time. An example of this I loved was a demonstration about the formation of gases by cows. To our delight, he did this by blowing up balloons (attached to containers made up to look like cows) to simulate the production of methane. Dr Walker’s props had evolved from a small cow toy with a tube protruding from its behind, to a cow toy sitting on its hind legs with a (deflated) balloon attached to its mouth. The balloon, filled with bicarb soda, was then tipped over into the stomach of the cow which contained vinegar, causing the balloon to inflate with carbon dioxide. A simple reaction, with a visually appealing result. Dr Walker then proceeded onto a cow constructed from a watering can in which he exploded a balloon using liquid nitrogen.

Liquid nitrogen cow…

Just before the balloon exploded…

These demonstrations raised a few important points.

Firstly, the importance of analogies in demonstrations. In these demonstrations, the cows were producing carbon dioxide or nitrogen gas depending on the demo. Cows produce predominantly methane, so it’s important to recognise the analogies and the limitations of all demonstrations lest the audience get the wrong message – the last thing you want in science communication.

Secondly, it highlighted the importance of always working on improving your props. Even if you think they’re fantastic, work on them. Play with them. See if you can make them better. As Dr Walker pointed out, a lot of good can come from tinkering. And a lot of good can come from plain old luck – you never know when your playing could make a demonstration that is better in new and exciting ways, or could demonstrate a completely new concept.

But on the flipside, the next thing to know was when to keep innovating or start from scratch and when to use other people’s ideas and build on them. After all, so much of science is building on previous work and making it better or taking it further. Isaac Newton’s quote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” was mentioned in addition to this. I have often been encouraged to use this method when developing my own science shows, some demonstrations are tried and tested and work well with audiences. Don’t feel bad about using other people’s demonstrations, building on them or making them your own. It’s all contributing to the field of science communication and education and it’s what they’re there for.

And I feel this post should conclude in a similar manner to that of the lecture. With a hovercraft. Before riding his hovercraft across the room, Dr Walker mentioned that he’d intended on adding a catapult to it before getting caught up in more tempting projects. To which my only response was: what’s more tempting than a catapult on a hovercraft?

(It’s rather difficult to take a good photo of a person on a moving hovercraft, especially when you’re laughing as hard as I was)

Australian Academy of Science – Professor Jenny Graves – Weird Animal Genomes, Sex and the Future of Men

I’m not used to writing about lectures I’ve attended, so naturally the one I begin with is totally out of my depth. I am an organometallic chemistry and science communication major, so a lecture about genomes was more than a little out of my comfort zone. The last time I did a biology course was the second year of my undergraduate degree and I can remember very little of it. So with that in mind, I found Professor Graves’ lecture wonderful.

Coming out of a full day of lectures, it was interesting coming to this public lecture from a science communication headspace. I discussed this with people also in my degree and we agreed on this. If it was a lecture for the general public, it would have been very difficult to understand. If I had taken my family, I would not have expected them to take much from the lecture. However, that was not the target audience of the lecture. This lecture, though marketed as a public lecture, was run by the Australian Academy of Science. It was geared towards scientifically minded people, or people with some science background. And for that audience, it was perfect. My two classes of undergraduate biology kicked in and I found myself able to meaningfully understand almost all of the content. And speaking to my friends who had varying (read: varying, but both more than me) backgrounds in biology, they both found the lecture to cater to their knowledge levels too, because Professor Graves would slip in tidbits of information for all knowledge levels – which is the mark of a good science communicator.

The lecture went for about an hour and I took many pages of notes, so I’m going to try to condense this to a much shorter length.

 

So in mammals, in addition to their other paired chromosomes, females have two X chromosomes and males have an X and a Y chromosome. And through investigation of sex-linked disorders such as Turner’s Syndrome (XO) or Klinefelter’s Syndrome (XXY), it is known that the Y chromosome dictates gender in mammals. 

However, the Y chromosome is small and contains a lot of junk information in comparison to the X chromosome. Graves and her research group believe that a long (long long long long) time ago the Y chromosome used to be an X chromosome and over a long time it degraded due to many deletions and mutations of genetic material, to become the Y chromosome it is today. From here, she poses the question whether it will continue to do this over time until eventually, the Y chromosome completely disappears.

She then went on to discuss the sex chromosomes in a whole range of Australian animals, including kangaroos, Tasmanian devils and platypuses (which are ridiculously cool, actually. Females have 26 pairs of chromosomes and 10 unpaired sex chromosomes and males have 21 pairs of chromosomes and the unpaired sex chromosomes. That’s SO COOL.) I don’t intend on discussing all the animals here, but if you are interested in looking, check out her work here.

So, how quickly is the human Y chromosome degrading? Well, if 166 million years ago the Y chromosome contained 1669 genes and today it contains 45 genes, then if it continues to degrade at the same rate, then it will disappear in approximately 4.6 million years.

So, if the Y chromosome disappears, what does that mean for men? Will they just die out completely? And will the human race die out with no men? Well, Professor Graves doesn’t think so. This has happened before – with the Spiny Rat. 

As the Spiny Rat evolved, the Y chromosome disappeared so that both males and females were XO. The important genes relocated and the Spiny Rat lives on. And this is what Professor Graves thinks will happen to humans if their Y chromosome does continue to degrade.

 

I’ll end this post with a photo. This photo is excellent because not only does it contain Professor Jenny Graves and Professor Brian Schmidt (ANU’s very own Nobel Laureate and thus rather popular around here) but also a hilarious diagram about what should be the genes in the human X and Y chromosomes.

 

Professor Sean Carroll – Public Lecture at the ANU

This photo comes from a week before I decided to start writing about the public lectures I went to. This lecture was given by Professor Sean Carroll about the Higgs Boson. It was amazing, and I feel I actually learnt a decent amount (though I didn’t take notes, so I don’t quite feel comfortable writing about it…)

Also, my friend’s super awesome band Party Gravy played before and after. And you should definitely check them out – click on the photo to be taken to their facebook.

From here on in, I promise to actually write about the lectures…

Sian goes Public

So since I’ve started this degree, it’s occurred to me that I don’t do enough real, proper, getting-out-there science communication.

Last night I went to a public lecture on animal chromosomes – something totally out of my depth and new for me. At the lecture, I decided I should start getting some science communication out there. Meeting more people, doing and writing more… stuff.

So in time, I will start going to more of these public lectures, and I shall endeavour to write about them – work on my communication outside of my field. And hopefully it’ll be interesting for all of us!

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”
― Albert Einstein