Every year the UC Santa Cruz science communications program – among the most successful formal, pedagogic producers of career science journalists in the country, with its specialty the conversion of researchers into reporters – publishes its fellows’ magazine-scale features. The result is Science Notes. This year’s issue is pretty good and in several places truly outstanding. No surprise there. They always are, and kudos to program director Rob Irion for keeping things rolling along.

Because our yard is full of bees, only minority being domestic honeybees, my faves include one I could identify with. It is on wild bees (it’s source of the illus, produced as are all the pubs’ arty pictures by students in science illustration at nearby California State University – Monterey Bay).  Another is  on something I’d never even thought to think about. That is, the ecosystems of São Tomé and Príncipe, an island nation straddling the equator in the Gulf of Guinea off west Africa. Turns out, I read, it is still teeming with weird fungus and toads and sea urchins and other creatures not cataloged, or hardly at all, yet it’s not some remote corner of New Guinea on the other side of the world or something like that but a couple of well-populated, big islands. And chances are it has oil, big money will flow in, and the whole little eden will get turned into crud and money. Or with planning and luck, not. It’s a fine story on discovery and a precarious landscape.

Whole lot of other  good reading here on on  tracking pumas, and on fixing glitches in a combat video game (appropriately, by a woman who used to fly combat helicopters as a US Marine), and on lizard family life and Peruvian gold and mysticism through traditional chemistry and salmon-snatching sea lions and slough management and on apps to help the blind know what’s in front of them. Take a look at the videos too. Listen carefully to the one on the bees. An almond farmer describes his new garden experiment, aimed at putting some wild bees among the domestic ones that pollinate his trees. He says, in proper San Joaquin Valley farmer fashion, he grows AMM-enz. The narrator reporter goes on calling them ALL-monds. If you ever wind up near Merced and meet a farmer with a mess of largeish trees in long rows blooming pink and white, ask him or her how the am’nz are doing. You’ll feel right at home.

The whole package is here, and  to give the budding science journos specific recognition here are links straight to their works.

Stories:

• Jane J. Lee: Documenting Eden ;
• Nadia Drake: Walking with Pumas ;
• Catherine Meyers: Peru’s Mountains of Gold ;
• Sandeep Ravindran: Lizard Family Ties ;
• Keith Rozendal: Meet Mother Ayahuasca ;
• Donna Hesterman: Fixing Glitchy Games ;
• Danielle Venton: Give Bees a Chance ;
• Melissae Fellet: Meeting of the Waters ;
• Susan Young: New Tools for the Blind ;
• Sascha Zubryd: The Salmon Snatchers ;

Grist for the Mill

: UCSC Science Communication Program ; CSUMB Science Illustration Program ;

- Charlie Petit

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