Making science sexy

A new course at Otago University is teaching students how to make science sexy.

The university's Centre for Science Communication is the first of its kind in New Zealand, set up to help students tell the public about scientific developments.

The centre is also responsible for teaching the country's future communicators through the Master of Science Communication programme starting this year.

Professor Lloyd Davis is heading up the centre which will take in 12 top students from a variety of backgrounds every year.

"Scientists are motivated by wanting to understand the truth about things around them. But almost all of them also wants to make the world a better place," he said.

"You can only get from outcomes to action if you can communicate the results well enough to affect the change.

"You really need to make it (science) sexy," he said.

Students can focus on three areas - creative non-fiction writing, general science communication or film-making.

The programme was open to non-scientists because often those who understood science were not the best at communicating it, he said.

"You have to make the complex things not simplistic, but simple enough so people can understand so you don't talk down to them.

"There's a huge appetite amongst the population for information, but the problem is they can't access it very easily."

Davis said the issue of global warming presented in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had catapulted science in to the mainstream.

However, there were a whole lot of inconvenient truths in the world and most went unreported.

More than 50 per cent of scientific papers published every year seemed to disappear.

They were never quoted or referred to even by other scientists, he said.

Source: stuff.co.nz