The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 (38 page)

JOHN PICKRELL is an award-winning journalist, editor of
Australian Geographic
and author of
Flying Dinosaurs.
He has worked in London, Washington DC and Sydney and written for publications including
New Scientist, Science, Science News, Cosmos, National Geographic
and
Scientific American.
A three-time finalist in the Australian Museum Eureka prizes, he has won an Earth journalism award and has been featured in
Best Australian Science Writing
in 2011 and 2014. Find him on Twitter @john_pickrell.

DAVID ROLAND has a PhD in clinical psychology. He is an honorary associate with the School of Medicine, University of Sydney; a member of the Australian Psychological Society; and is one of the founders of Compassionate Mind Australia. His latest book is the memoir
How I Rescued My Brain: A psychologist's remarkable recovery from stroke and trauma.
David is a public speaker, musician, and advocate for mental health and disability issues. <
www.davidroland.com.au
>.

JOHN ROSS is a science and higher education journalist with
The Australian.
He has won numerous awards for his reporting on tertiary education. He has also written for
Campus Review
and freelanced for the
Sydney Morning Herald
and the
Good Weekend.
He has also worked at various times as a musician, English teacher, casual scriptwriter, kitchen-hand, landscape labourer and sugar cane chipper. He swims every morning, drinks too much coffee and plays Galician bagpipes quite badly.

MANU SAUNDERS is an ecologist at Charles Sturt University's Institute for Land, Water & Society. Her research interests include plant-pollinator interactions, and the role of insect communities in building ecosystem resilience. Prior to embarking on her scientific career, she studied and worked in literature and communications. She has published a number of popular science articles on her research, and shares her passion for ecology through her long-running blog ‘Ecology is not a dirty word'.

MICHAEL SLEZAK is an award-winning science reporter and
New Scientist
magazine's correspondent in Australasia. He writes about everything from Higgs bosons and cane toads to psychoactive drugs and climate change. Before working at
New Scientist
, Michael was a medical journalist. Before that he studied philosophy of science, spending a lot of time thinking about the nature of time, thermodynamics and causality.

BRIDIE SMITH is the science editor, leading the science and environment reporting team at
The Age.
Her science reporting has won multiple awards, including the Melbourne Press Club Quill for best use of digital or social media. Since joining
The Age
in 2001, she has covered a variety of rounds including general news, consumer affairs and education. She has covered science since 2008. Bridie has a bachelor of arts with first class honours in history from Monash University.

ADAM SPENCER won the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Raw Comedy Championship in 1996 while doing a Maths PhD at Sydney University. He went on to host the triple j breakfast show with Wil Anderson before graduating to 702 ABC Sydney where he secured record ratings for eight years. His TV credits include ‘The Glasshouse', ‘Good News Week' and ‘Sleek Geeks'. His 2013 TED talk at Long Beach California on Prime
Numbers is a geek comedy classic and has had over 1.5 million views. Adam's recent book is
Adam Spencer's Big Book of Numbers
(2014). He lives on the NSW Central Coast with his family.

DANIEL STACEY is a reporter with the
Wall Street Journal
in Sydney. His work in print and film has won a number of awards, including an Emmy for the feature documentary
Saddam's Road to Hell
which he associate-produced, and citation in the 2009 Utne Independent Press Awards for International Coverage given to
The New Statesman.
In 2014 he launched the ABC's first tablet magazine,
White Paper.

GILLIAN TERZIS is an editor of the Melbourne-based literary journal
The Lifted Brow
and a writer interested in the intersection of technology and culture. Her work has appeared in national and international publications including
The Saturday Paper, The Atlantic, The Australian, Foreign Policy
and
The Economist
, among others.

WENDY ZUKERMAN is a science journalist and producer for Radio National. She is the creator and host of the ABC podcast
Science Vs
, regular contributor to
The Saturday Paper
and regularly discusses science on triple j and 702 ABC Sydney. Wendy has previously worked on ABC's
Catalyst
and
The Checkout.
She was the Asia Pacific reporter for
New Scientist
magazine.

Acknowledgments

‘All dressed up for Mars and nowhere to go' by Elmo Keep was published on Matter <
medium.com/matter
> on 9 November 2014. This is an edited version of the original.

‘The vanishing writers' by Fiona McMillan was published on her blog Luminous <
fionamcmillan.com
> on 8 February 2015.

‘I, wormbot: The next step in artificial intelligence' by Gillian Terzis was published in
The Saturday Paper
on 14 February 2015.

‘It's all in your mind: The feeling of “wetness” is an illusion' by Jesse Hawley was first published on Think Inc. <
thinkinc.org.au
> and his blog Pensapiens <
pensapiens.com
> on 5 October 2014.

‘Love bug' by Wendy Zukerman was published in
The Saturday Paper
on 23 September 2014.

‘Light' by Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax was first published by Relative Constructions in The Poetic Lens exhibition catalogue, 2014.

‘Playing God' by Bridie Smith was published in the
Good Weekend
magazine and online on 26 September 2014.

‘Job description' by Alice Gorman was published in
The
Archaeologist
, Winter issue 2015.

‘The past may not make you feel better', from
The Invisible History of the Human Race
by Christine Kenneally, copyright © 2014 by Christine Kenneally. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC and Black Inc.

‘Maths explains how lobsters swim' by Clare Pain was published online by ABC Science <
www.abc.net.au/science
> on 9 September 2014.

‘Global “roadmap” shows where to put roads without costing the earth' by William Laurance was first published on
The Conversation
<
theconversation.com
> on 28 August 2014.

‘Messages from Mungo' by John Pickrell was published in
Australian Geographic
magazine, November 2014.

‘Uncharted waters' by Daniel Stacey was published in the
Wall
Street Journal
on 31 July 2014. Reprinted with permission of the
Wall Street Journal.
Copyright © 2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

‘Field guide to the future' by Ian Lunt was published on his blog Ecology for Australia <
ianluntecology.com
> on 5 January 2014.

‘How I rescued my brain' by David Roland is an extract from his book
How I Rescued My Brain
, published by Scribe on 23 July 2014.

‘Small mammals vanish in northern Australia' by Dyani Lewis was published in
Science
on 5 September 2014.

‘Will a statin a day really keep the doctor away?' by Elizabeth Finkel was published in
Cosmos
magazine on 29 December 2014.

‘An uneasy alliance' by Elizabeth Bryer was published in
Kill Your
Darlings
in July 2014.

‘Aliens versus predators: The toxic toad invasion' by Michael Slezak was published in
New Scientist
magazine on 25 April 2014. © 2014 Reed Business Information – UK. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

‘What shall we teach the children' by George Clark was published on his website Australian Poetry and Wine <
australianpoetryandwine.com
> in July 2014.

‘Why aren't we dead yet?' by Idan Ben-Barak is an extract from his
book
Why Aren't We Dead Yet?
, published by Scribe on 28 July, 2014.

‘Robots on a roll' by James Mitchell Crow was published in
Cosmos
magazine in October 2014.

‘Honest placebos' by Jane McCredie was published on MJA Insight <
mja.com.au/insight
> on 10 June, 2014.

‘Imagine there's new metrics (it's easy if you try)' by Jenny Martin was first published on her blog cubistcrystal <
cubistcrystal.wordpress.com
>.

‘The women who fell through the cracks of the Universe' by Lauren Fuge was published in
On Dit
on 12 August 2014.

‘Beating the odds' by Trent Dalton was published in
The Weekend
Australian Magazine
on 7 March 2015.

‘Where's the proof in science? There is none.' by Geraint Lewis was published on
The Conversation
<
theconversation.com
> on 23 September 2014.

‘Germ war breakthrough' by John Ross was published in
The
Australian
on 21 January 2015.

‘Lost in a floral desert' by Manu Saunders was published in
Wildlife Australia
in March 2015.

‘Revisiting Milgram's shocking obedience experiments' by Nick Haslam and Gina Perry was published on
The Conversation
<
theconversation.com
> on 5 April 2014.

‘Social robots are coming' by Wilson da Silva was published in
Cosmos
magazine on 6 October 2014.

‘How dust affects climate, health and … everything' by Tim Low was published in
The Weekend Australian Magazine
on 7 February 2015.

‘Copulate to populate: Ancient Scottish fish did it sideways' by John Long was published on
The Conversation
<
theconversation.com
> on 20 October 2014.

‘The mind of Michio Kaku' by Tim Dean was published in
Cosmos
magazine on 21 July 2014.

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 the 2015 prize are included in this anthology.

For the very first time in 2015 the successful Bragg Prize, which recognises excellence in science communication, has opened a special category for high school students. Science enthusiasts in years 7–10 were invited to submit an essay of up to 800 words on the topic of mind-blowing experiments.