Nicola Jones

Here's my take on a great Science paper for Nature: how ivory hunting in Mozambique has driven the evolution of tusklessness in female elephants in that country. A fascinating story both in terms of the scientific detective work to track the genetic component of this evolutionary pressure, and in terms of what it means for the elephants. The trait is fatal for male offspring, so the elephant population will skew to having more females than males, and overall growth of the struggling population will be hindered. Plus... apparently tuskless elephants eat different plants, which could alter the entire ecosystem of the region. Amazing stuff! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02867-y

 It was my great pleasure to edit this piece for publication in Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02818-7 The Congo is the world's second largest rainforest after the Amazon, yet receives so very little attention in both the media and from science budgets. These researchers make a persuasive case for investing $150 million in local science and scientists.

Here's a news piece on a paper that hammers home the importance of caring for watersheds and not logging the areas where salmon are spawning. Salmon across the Pacific Northwest are crashing: these researchers are helping to unpick why. https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/salmon-need-trees/

Here's a feature I wrote in record time (1 week!) for Yale Environment 360 on corals, pegged to the latest global assessment (it's bad, but not as bad as it could be) and rounding up the latest in conservation efforts (from electrically-stimulated reefs to probiotic smears and cloud brightening trials).  https://e360.yale.edu/features/finding-bright-spots-in-the-global-coral-reef-catastrophe

Not to blow my own horn (pun intended), but... I am so happy to share the news that my feature for Nature on noise pollution in the ocean has won the Acoustical Society of America award for science communication ( short format category). Shout out (pun intended) to my editor, contacts, sources and everyone involved; and TED for giving it a bright stage.  

Between Rwanda and the DRC lies a strange lake with the capacity to explode: Lake Kivu. It is one of only a handful of lakes in the world like this: they build up volcanic gas in their bottom waters until they sit like a bottle of champagne with a cork on top. Pop the cork and the gas can be explosively released. I had the honour of visiting one of the other such lakes, Lake Nyos, back in 2001 (more about that below); it had blown up in 1986, tragically killing more than 17000 people. Lake Kivu is much, much bigger, with many, many more people living on its shores. Commercial efforts are currently underway to extract some of its gas (both to lower the explosive risk, and to burn the extracted methane as fuel for electricity). But experts can't agree whether the lake is getting safer or not. https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-021-02523-5/index.html This was a hard feature to report. The people involved care deeply about Rwanda and its people; many have strong views about the la...

I was lucky enough to edit this great piece in Nature about the wiggly ways in which 'net zero' emissions are talked about. Time to pin them down! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00662-3