Nicola Jones

Less than a fifth of deep sea life is identifiable: a wonderful statistic explained for Hakai magazine: https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/less-than-a-fifth-of-deep-sea-life-is-identifiable/ I stumbled on this story while trawling through abstracts for a conference online (I was unable to attend). I was impressed by the scope of the study, and the hard number it provided on just how weird the deep sea can be.

What do you do when you find out about a massive (but expensive) convention on board games in Vancouver? Apply for a press pass and write a feature, obviously! Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of board gaming: https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/whistler/game-on/Content?oid=15034635

Yale e360 assigned me this wonderful story about how Indigenous groups are taking a lead on climate change adaptation plans. https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-native-tribes-are-taking-the-lead-on-planning-for-climate-change Sadly I was unable to visit the Swinomish, although it would, as it turns out, have been an ill-timed visit to Washington state (in February, just as the novel coronavirus was establishing there). I did, however, attend a wonderful session on Indigenous climate action at the joint Canadian Anthropology Society and American Anthropological Association conference in Vancouver in November 2019. My work for the anthropology magazine SAPIENS has helped me to understand Indigenous views on health, and how environmental health is seen as so integral to human health; physical and mental health so intertwined.

I spent much of 2019 helping to commission, edit and write this comprehensive report about sustainability, blending physical and social science in what I think is a really useful way. https://futureearth.org/2020/02/07/we-have-launched-the-our-future-on-earth-2020-report/ Many thanks to Future Earth for the opportunity, and to all the authors who worked so hard and put up with my multiple rounds of editing! NOTE: No, there is no chapter in this report about pandemics, which goes to show how unpredictable our world can be.

The dangers of a noisy ocean - and how we can quiet it down On March 13, 2019, I received the following email. I thought it was a prank, but it turned out to be REAL (apparently this is a common response to these emails). Dear Nicola, together with my colleagues at TED we’ve been reading your writings for a while.  I was particularly interested on your story about climate change shifting lines on maps ( this one ). Climate zones have been shifting for a few decades, sadly, and there are additional phenomena that you don’t cover in your article (such as the tree lines moving uphill in the Alps). But I found your article a really interesting way to frame climate change in a visible way. And it’s a way that we haven’t tried as a TEDTalk yet.  So I’ve been wondering whether you would be interested in discussing and exploring the possibility of turning this article into a TEDTalk. I’m the Global Curator of TED ( www.ted.com ) and we are currently planning our 2019 internatio...

In 2018, I had the opportunity to attend a Pew Charitable Trust meeting as an invited speaker on science communication. While there I met the wonderful Rob Williams, a scientist who spoke eloquently about being an "acoustic prospector" in search of silent seas. The idea of noise pollution in the ocean was poetic, compelling, and intriguing. So I wrote this. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01098-6  It was later turned into a TED talk . UPDATE: this piece won an Acoustical Society of America communication award for 2019/2020

Fragments of a hominin skull add to the sparse collection from our obscure cousins.  I dug up these unpublished results in a conference abstract, and reported on it for Sapiens. https://www.sapiens.org/biology/denisovan-skull-found/