Adventures in Science

One of the things I love about my career is it has given me the opportunity to do some amazing things in the name of science writing. Here's a few!

1. Lighting undersea ice on fire

Back in the 1990s when I was doing my undergraduate degree in chemistry and oceanography at UBC I had the opportunity to go to sea on the RV Sonne, helping Michael Whiticar and other scientists to dig up methane clathrate -- frozen chunks of ice and methane gas that exist naturally under some parts of the sea floor. Methane clathrates have, excitingly, been responsible for massive climate change in the past (because as sea levels drop the pressure on the sea floor lessens, causing clathrate to melt and releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gas into the air). They have also been flagged as a possible cause for the Bermuda triangle (because gas-filled waters are less buoyant). Researchers are keen to pull it up so they can confirm how much is down there, understand its potential for future warming, and study its isotopic signature to understand better where it came from in the first place.

We managed to pull up a massive chunk of methane from off the west coast of North America. This was extremely exciting. Researchers were running around like kids (but in gas masks) cracking off bits of bubbling ice and lighting it on fire with a lighter just for kicks. More serious science followed back in the lab. 

I wrote about this for Chemistry and Industry, winning their International Science writing award in 2000 and launching my science journalism career. It's a topic I have kept up on, writing about it for New Scientist, Nature, Yale e360 and others.

2. Working at Time Magazine the weekend that JFK Jr's plane crashed in Martha's Vineyard 

In 1999, I was half way through my masters degree of journalism at UBC and lucky enough to get an internship at Time Canada, a small offshoot of Time Magazine based at their main offices in New York. I had a blast that summer, and learned a lot, but managed to basically miss the biggest news event of the summer.

Time magazine goes to press late on a Friday night. To make sure the magazine is current, the staff skip Mondays, work a half day on Tuesdays, a full day on Wednesdays, a long day on Thursdays and a double day on Fridays, often staying until the small hours of Saturday morning (there was a catered dinner, and a butler would bring around crystal decanters of whisky for the editors, yes really). Although my contribution as an intern was negligible, I'd stick around to watch this happen. 

 

One week in July, I left the office at the same time as nearly everyone else, heading home for a few blurry hours of sleep. On Saturday I woke and got on a train to go rock climbing in the Shawangunks. Unbeknownst to me, just after 9:30pm on Friday night, July 16, JFK Jr's plane went down. Time Magazine's essential staff were called back in, and they ripped up the magazine as planned for July 26 and started fresh, compiling an entirely new edition over the weekend that hit news stands by Tuesday July 20. I entirely missed this huge journalistic feat. Sigh. 

3. Swimming in an exploding lake in Africa 

 Back in 2001 I travelled to Cameroon to visit Lake Nyos, a geological anomaly that exploded in a deadly eruption of trapped volcanic gases back in 1986. The researchers asked for me by name because they had read a feature I had written in New Scientist magazine about some crazy Russian explorers trying to suck valuable minerals out of an active volcano. They thought: aha, that's the kind of intrepid writer we want here with us! They didn't know two things. One, I had written that volcano feature without ever leaving my desk in London. Two, I was a woman. In France, Nicola is a man's name, and they were expecting a seasoned male reporter to roll into their rustic and remote camp. They were quite surprised when I turned up. Nevermind... it all worked out. And it was an adventure. Yes, we all really did swim in the lake, despite its explosive potential.

The research team has kept this project up, and expanded their work to Lake Kivu.  

4.  High times for marijuana legislation

In the 2001, Britain was considering decriminalizing marijuana and New Scientist magazine wanted to send a reporter to Amsterdam to check in on how the legal approach there had affected things like crime rates and addiction. "Let's send the girl from Vancouver" they said, snickering. At the time, Vancouver had a reputation for being full of potheads. What the magazine didn't know is that I'd never tried the stuff (or any other drug). After thoroughly reporting and writing my story, I felt I could not and should not file until having experienced something myself. A friend of a friend who owned a pot cafe made me a piece of cake with a very mild dose. "Have it for free," they said. "No," I said. "I'll pay. And give me a receipt." And that is how a line item for "space cake" wound up on my expense sheet for New Scientist. It went through without a hitch.

5. Watching a Hollywood stunt pilot try to catch a falling spacecraft

In 2004 I travelled to Utah to watch a stunt helicopter pilot try to snag a falling object, in preparation for the mission to catch 'Stardust', a craft that was bringing back samples of the solar wind. I vaguely remember that he succeeded in the trial run; sadly during the real deal the spacecraft crashed, though they managed to salvage some of the sample.

6.  Astronaut training (sort of): lying down for science

In 2005 I went to Toulouse, France, to join a cadre of women who had volunteered to lie down for several months, without EVER getting up, in order to simulate the bone and muscle loss experienced by astronauts. The research team was trialling different exercises designed to help stem these losses. I only joined them for a day, thank goodness. PS - who wrote the headline on the Nature article??? "Lie back and think of..." is a phrase with some pretty nasty connotations. Some things do not age well.

7. Holding a copy of 'the kilogram'

I have (weirdly) had a lot of fun over the years chatting with scientists attempting to redefine some of the basic units of measurement. Why would they do that, you ask? Well... the whole point of having agreed-upon units of measure is that everyone agrees on them, right? A metre is a metre long, always, for everyone; a kilogram is a kilogram. But it turns out it's quite hard to do that. 

A 'metre' was defined in 1791 during the French revolution as being one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a path that cut through Paris. They did this in the spirit of egalitarianism, so that, in theory, anyone could work out for themselves the length of a metre. In practice, though, this was tricky. In 1799, they redefined it in terms of a prototype metre bar: a real, actual stick of metal that was, by definition, a metre long. This stick has been refined over the years, and kept in a vault in Paris. (You can't just leave it lying around, in case someone dents it or it rusts or it otherwise changes in length). After Einstein worked out that the speed of light was constant, the definition of a meter swapped to being the distance travelled by light in a particular, teeny tiny fraction of a second. That pins the metre to a fundamental constant (c) so it will never change again! 

Scientists have been trying to do the same for all the units of measure: move them away from some arbitrary object in a vault in Paris and instead pin them to a fundamental constant of nature. One of the wackiest adventures in this journey has been for the Kelvin, the unit of measure for temperature (you may never have heard of it; it's kinda the same as Celsius, but it starts at 'absolute zero', the coldest you can get at about -273 C, instead of at the freezing point of water). I wrote about that for Nature in 2009. 

A kilogram was originally defined as the mass of a litre of water (but this begs the question: what kind of water, exactly, at what temperature and pressure... it is fraught with difficulties). So a kilogram has long been a lump of metal (a cylinder of platinum-irridium) sitting in that Paris vault. People made copies of this, and distributed them to national labs around the world, so that every country could set its scales to the right value. I got to hold one of these (or a copy of the copy, as shown), at the UK's National Metrology Institute. 

Researchers finally got around to redefining the kilogram in 2019, along with a host of other measures, pinning the kilogram to Planck's constant. Horrah! Sadly I was no longer on staff at Nature when this happened, so I didn't get to write it up myself.

8. Visiting Beijing

In 2006, I attended a climate change conference in Beijing. I had to have a special invitation to the country to visit as a journalist, which made me nervous the entire time. 

 

There was a weird console in my hotel room that looked like an old fashioned control panel; some of it played the radio, some controlled lights, and one button was ominously labelled "do not". I waited until the last day to push it. 

 

Turns out it toggled on a "do not disturb" sign outside my room. 

 

Nothing particularly untoward happened on this trip, although there was a suspicious power outage at one point which was rumoured to be masking a news report they didn't want the public to see. I was also intrigued by some simple and clever innovations around the language barrier: the hotel had its name printed on small slips of paper that you could take with you in a taxi so you could eventually make your way back. And all restaurants had pictures in their menus. This was all pre-smart-phone days... I'm sure things are different now.

9. Sifting through fossils in the Burgess Shale

In 2009, I had the opportunity to visit the famous Burgess Shale site near Banff, Canada, as part of their centenary celebrations. 

The Burgess Shale is a 500-million-year-old fossil deposit and world UNESCO hermitage site renowned for preserving weird, soft-bodied creatures of the Cambrian. 

 

 

10. Sitting in a submersible (on a conference floor)

Here I am at an American Geophysical Union meeting sometime around 2010 sitting in a submersible: a submarine used for science. I thought it was part of the famous Alvin, but looking at images of that craft now I'm not so sure...

11. Donating blood -- at a wedding

In 2009, our amazing friends Nik Flemming and Linda Geddes got married. They are both science journalists, and decided to turn their wedding into a science experiment. They had a local researcher come and take blood samples from the bride/groom and various members of the wedding party (including me) to see if our oxytocin levels went up as we experienced this bonding ritual. Linda wrote about it for New Scientist (she is amazing; she has also written about whether she is chemically matched to her partner; the science of childbirth and kid raising; and more). I wrote about it for a Canadian newspaper.

[If you notice a large gap in fun science adventures in the timeline here, consider that I was conducting a different sort of adventure: having 2 kids]

12. Giving a TED talk 

In 2019, I was invited to give a TED talk at their global stage in Edinburgh. I did explain to them that I was just a journalist who had happened to write about noise pollution in the ocean, and not a real expert, but they kept me in their lineup just the same. That was a crazy experience.