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Imaggeo on Mondays: Blue haze

In this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays, brought to you by the photographer himself, Lukas Hörtnagl (University of Innsbruck, Austria) tells us about the ‘blue haze’ or ‘tule fog’ of California’s Sequoia National Park. I was visiting the United States to attend the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2011 and decided to …[Read More]

Going to This Year’s AGU Meeting?

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) convenes this week for their 45th annual fall meeting – the world’s largest international gathering of Earth scientists. Geoscientists from all around the world will be sharing their latest research and catching up with colleagues from other institutions. There will be plenty of talks relevant to GfGD. We’ve picked our highlights from …[Read More]

Eat your greens, and you’ll grow up to be a big dinosaur

What comes to your mind when someone says ‘theropod dinosaurs’ to you? Does the mind conjour images of Tyrannosaurus rex noshing on lawyers, packs of voracious Deinonychus ambushing unsuspecting ornithopods, or perhaps you’re quite progressive and thought about flocks of birds migrating south for the winter. Sticking strictly to the Mesozoic (before 65.5 million years …[Read More]

The crux of the matter – language, context, and narrative

Throughout this series, I have highlighted the pitfalls and issues associated with effective communication of scientific knowledge to and with the public. This has largely been fueled by a recent paper highlighting these points as stepping stones and hurdles which scientists face and can develop upon to create strategies for becoming better at public communication. However, I’ve …[Read More]

Launch of Foresight Report: Reducing the Risk of Future Disasters.

Today the UK government released their highly anticipated foresight report into “Reducing the Risk of Future Disasters”. This report, led by the UK government’s chief scientific advisor, Sir John Beddington, looks at disasters in developing countries that have resulted from natural hazards. The aim has been ‘to provide advice to decision makers on how science …[Read More]

Story-telling rocks.

‘Story-telling’ is often quoted as a way of communicating scientific ideas to non-scientific audiences. It’s seen as a way of providing a form of narrative with which an audience can relate to, and thus provide a more engaging account of a scientific report. Admittedly, not everything can be transformed into a story of sorts, but …[Read More]