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The meanings of certain words can be less clear-cut than one might expect when they appear in different contexts. In Lewis Carroll’s classic book Through the Looking-Glass, for instance, the following conversation takes place between Alice and Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Words that mean one thing in everyday speech may have very specific and possibly quite different meanings in other contexts, particularly in science. There are many such words, but one example of this ambiguity is the meaning of the word neutral. In chemistry, neutral defines a specific state of matter—a water solution that is neither acidic nor basic, or an atom or molecule with no electrical charge. But in non-scientific uses of the word, it generally means “not favoring either side,” such as in a contest or competition.

In non-scientific contexts, it is usually clear what it means to not take a side: We can think of a “neutral judge” or a “neutral playing field.” But when using neutral in a scientific context, such as a “neutral solution” or a “neutral atom,” the “sides” in the contest may not be as apparent, although the basic definition still can be made to fit. Alternate meanings for the same term can be confusing when trying to describe a scientific concept in the classroom. This issue arises with many terms commonly used in biology, chemistry, and physics.

Let’s more closely examine the word neutral as used in the phrase “neutral water solution.” Chemically, all water solutions contain two charged components: the hydrogen ion and the hydroxide ion. (An ion is simply an atom, molecule, or sometimes larger aggregate that has an electrical charge.) An acidic solution is one in which the concentration of hydrogen ions is larger than that of hydroxide ions, whereas a basic solution is one in which the opposite is true. A “neutral solution” describes a very special state of the water solution in which the concentration of hydrogen ions is exactly equal to that of hydroxide ions. Applying the colloquial meaning of neutral—“not favoring either side”—in trying to understand the scientific concept can often lead to confusion. For instance, in my experience, chemistry students often incorrectly associate neutral in the phrase “neutral solution” with stationary or unchanging, and subsequently with a solution that is chemically unreactive.

Alternately, when scientists use the term neutral to describe an electrical state of a sample of matter, the two “sides” in the competition are the positively-charged subcomponents of atoms known as protons and the negatively-charged subcomponents known as electrons. In this case, understanding the concept of neutral through the lens of “not favoring either side” would be with respect to having equal numbers of protons and electrons—and thus, no excess positive or negative electrical charge. Applying the general definition here works to a point, but can also lead to inconsistencies such as equating neutral with inactive or stable.

Understanding of the meaning of neutral can get more confusing when the related term neutralize is considered. In everyday speech, to neutralize someone or something is often taken to mean “to remove the threat of someone or something that might be dangerous, especially by killing them or destroying it.” One might casually speak of “neutralizing a poison” or “neutralizing an enemy threat.” Although the former use sounds scientifically accurate, to neutralize in chemistry means something very narrow: to react a hydrogen ion with a hydroxide ion to form a water molecule. When that occurs, a solution can become either less acidic or less basic but there is no killing—these are inanimate chemical species—nor destroying, because of the fundamental principle of conservation of matter in chemical processes. In an acid-base reaction, the component parts are still present, but in a different combined form.

Although a good chemist would not equate “neutralizing a poison” with an actual acid-base neutralization reaction, a novice chemistry learner might—making the actual meaning of “neutralization” murkier in his or her mind. This is yet another instance in which the overlapping contextual meanings of a word like neutral, or its variants, have the potential to lead a person to misunderstand the meaning of a scientific term.

Many years of observing university-level students’ understanding (and misunderstanding) of multiple-meaning terms have convinced me that science learners need to develop skills in discerning and contextualizing word meaning—not only to advance their basic science skills, but to better prepare themselves for their professional lives. But the responsibility of overcoming the tendency to conflate scientific and colloquial meaning should be shared by instructors and students alike.

Science vocabulary is often taught through rote memorization, but this is not the only means to do so. As the science educator Arnold B. Arons observed, scientific terms “are metaphors, drawn from everyday speech, to which we give profoundly altered scientific meaning, only vaguely connected to the meaning in everyday speech.” Therefore, “students remain unaware of the alteration unless it is pointed to explicitly many times.”

If we want chemistry students to really understand acids, bases, neutral solutions, what it means to be electrically neutral, and other scientific concepts, we must emphasize the places where scientific language differs from everyday speech.

Learning concepts in a specialized subject often entails learning to use a new language built of familiar words. A part of this requires being able to reconcile a previous understanding of what certain terms mean in the language of that subject. In other words, it is necessary to be able to compartmentalize language for various subjects or audiences. Science educators need to carefully consider how understanding of the subtle differences between colloquial and scientific usages of specific terms may be essential in forming a deep understanding of scientific concepts.

An analogous, but not quite equivalent situation in confusing word meaning arises in learning a foreign language where English sounding words mean something totally different in another language despite shared Latin roots. For example, Spanish’s embarazada does not mean embarrassed, but pregnant.

Learning technical concepts can be difficult, especially when it involves cognitive conflicts that necessitate replacing what you believed with a more correct interpretation. Words, including neutral, are the major currency of human communication both in science, and in social discourse. It is imperative that we negotiate and contextualize word meaning so we can better understand the world around us and communicate with each other.

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On June 30, 1908, a sudden blast knocked down over 2,000 square kilometers of forest in a sparsely inhabited part of Siberia. Witnesses saw a fireball from hundreds of miles away. At least one Indigenous Evenki man, and possibly two more, perished, and several individuals suffered minor injuries.

Meanwhile, our knowledge about the class of smaller near-Earth objects between 10 and 140 meters in diameter—like the one that exploded over Tunguska—is much more limited. These could still do significant damage depending on their composition and where they hit, eviscerating cities and decimating their populations. Only a small portion of these asteroids have been identified, making it more likely that they could hit with little warning. If anything big barrels our way, we will likely have time to prepare and react. But that doesn’t mean our troubles are over. Scientists and policymakers are still figuring out how to react to learning of an impending cosmic collision.

Photo from the Tunguska explosion on June 30, 1908. (Public Domain)

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Hawai‘i is a spectacular place—not just visually exciting, but also located above incredible geological forces and beneath amazing atmospheric conditions. As a meteorologist who reports on earth science news, I call the Aloha State home because of the multiple scientific processes that come together here every day to create a true paradise.

The casual joke shared among locals is that we live on an island that is actively trying to kill us. Hawai‘i has a long history of epic natural disasters and will be a home for earthquakes, tsunamis, flash floods, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions for thousands of years to come. But the wildfire tragedy on August 8 on Maui has turned the joke on its head, leaving my neighbors and me to wonder whether it’s more than just nature that doesn’t have our best interests at heart. Why don’t leaders take better advantage of our vast scientific knowledge to prevent future catastrophes?

I live in Waikoloa Village on the Big Island of Hawai‘i’s west coast, which the Hawai‘i Wildfire Management Organization declared one of the communities most at-risk of fire in the state. Here, down-sloping, east-to-west trade winds tend to warm and dry the air, leading to an abundance of warm sunny days year-round. But when the atmospheric pattern is just right over the Pacific, as was the case when Hurricane Dora passed well south of Hawai‘i on August 7, 8, and 9, those winds can be fierce, potentially damaging, and extraordinarily dry. The same is true for many other leeward (downwind) communities in Hawai‘i in the shadows of old volcanic mountains that blunt most precipitation away to the windward (wind-facing) side.

Waikoloa Village, a community of about 7,400 people sitting about 900 feet above sea level, is also uniquely situated on ancient lava flows from two volcanoes. Over time, invasive grasses introduced by ranchers and landscapers have spread on what was once a completely barren landscape, coming to life in infrequent rainy periods, and going dormant or dead for most of the year.

The community is packed tightly together in a mix of one- or two-story homes of wooden frame construction, with larger parcels and condominium complexes here and there. It is essentially a giant cul-de-sac, with a single road leading in and out. During a 2021 evacuation event in which fire threatened the village, many were trapped in traffic for hours. Fire fighters successfully fought that battle, but we cannot rest peacefully knowing they may not prevail next time.

Maui’s Lahaina, like Waikoloa Village, had previous experience with wildfire threats. Yet in both places, there have been few policy changes or necessary investments in recent years: no substantial changes to building codes, evacuation programs, communication systems, or land use issues where flammable invasive vegetation runs rampant. Many utility lines, including several that run on poles through the grassy regions upwind of Waikoloa Village, remain exposed to the elements, as was the case in Lahaina, where electrical sparks ignited the recent tragedy there. On Hawai‘i Island, government officials make promises for Waikoloa Village, but have done little beyond permitting new construction and inviting in new residents. Commitments and deadlines to install emergency sirens, roadway improvements like traffic lights, and the construction of new roadways to improve evacuation routes come and go with the regularity of the trade winds.

The author’s backyard is surrounded by a tinderbox of flammable invasive grass. Photo by author.

There is a sincere sense of loss in our state after the August 8 fires. But in addition to missing hundreds of people, we’re also missing out on a sense of urgency, purpose, and intent to prevent the next disaster. This is inexcusable, in part because we have the forecasting technology and knowledge to make better broad policy decisions as well as to sound the alarm in advance of specific events, like the August 8 fire, as well as broader threats, like the current drought.

We are currently in the midst of ENSO, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a recurring climate pattern involving changes in the temperature of waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Over an ENSO period ranging from about three to seven years, the surface waters across a large swath of the tropical Pacific Ocean warm or cool by anywhere from 1°C to 3°C, compared to normal. This oscillating warming and cooling pattern directly affects rainfall distribution in the tropics and can have a strong influence on weather across the United States and other parts of the world. El Niño and La Niña are the extreme phases of the ENSO cycle; between these two phases is a third phase called ENSO-neutral.

While these phenomena impact the entire United States, Hawai‘i may find itself particularly vulnerable to bad weather this year, as a wet La Niña fades and a dry El Niño arrives. In May, Kevin Kodama, hydrologist at the Honolulu office of the National Weather Service, shared their 2022-2023 Wet Season Rainfall Summary. According to Kodama, the October–April wet season in Hawai‘i was an unusual one, starting off with severe or extreme drought in portions of all four of Hawai‘i’s counties, which gave way to the state’s ninth wettest wet season over the last 30 years. The Big Island saw the most rain, with rainfalls recorded at 130–170% of average.

Now, the National Weather Service is predicting an active 2023 hurricane season combined with severe drought by the end of dry season in October. Drought is most likely in the leeward areas, especially in Maui County and the Big Island—the two islands that saw fires break out on August 8. The bumper crop of invasive grass and scrub that blossomed earlier in the wet season is becoming a wasteland of drying fire fuels.

The forecast is crystal clear: Meteorological ingredients will conspire for ripe fire weather conditions in the months ahead. More lives could be at risk. And even as it is so obvious to forecasters and the public at large that more disasters are coming, the outlook on what the government will do, if anything, is cloudy at best.

Thus far, rather than capitalize on the loss, the media attention, and the tremendous amount of federal aid coming in, leaders here are digging their heads into the sand, doing what they did ahead of the Lahaina fire: hoping that disaster doesn’t happen. And because of that, the aloha spirit is being severely challenged, allowing a fog of anxiety and anger to rise. For this meteorologist, the overall outlook for Hawai‘i isn’t as sunny as it should be.

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Birdkeepers are almost universally scorned by anyone else interested in birds. Biologists and birdwatchers alike are generally opposed to the idea of birds being kept in captivity. But during a lifetime of admiring and studying birds, birdkeepers have helped me push the field forward and taught me something along the way: Sometimes seemingly irreconcilable worlds can collide, with wonderful results.

Some estimates suggest that during the 19th century, every second household in Britain raised “cage birds.” In an era before radio, TV, or social media, the creatures provided company, entertainment, and occasionally education. The European goldfinch was the most popular: easily tamed, beautifully colored, and with a tinkling, spirit-raising song.

In the 1950s, when I was growing up in northern England, many people—usually men—still kept birds. They bred and raised their birds, as well as entered them in competitions and exhibited them at shows in hopes of winning awards.

For someone keen to get close to birds, as I was as a kid, it was natural to want to keep birds, too. My father encouraged me by building an aviary in the garden. Looking after my birds made me generate a tremendous sense of empathy for them. When they successfully nested and reared their chicks, I was a proud parent. I felt the same about wild birds—a sense of wanting to care for them—especially during the pesticide era of the late 1960s, when many died from DDT exposure. I became obsessed. I studied zoology as an undergraduate, and then undertook a doctorate on birds at Oxford.

Birdkeepers at work. Photo by B. Oliver.

By the 1970s, when I did my Ph.D., most people who still kept birds in Britain were working class. Among the wealthier set concerned with conservation, including some of the people with whom I studied, keeping birds in confinement was considered unethical.

At the time, my field of study was undergoing a revolution. We were beginning to look at behavior through an evolutionary lens, and to ask new questions. Why, for example, did some animals pair monogamously while others were promiscuous? With this new approach, formerly inexplicable behaviors and anatomical features started to make sense.

My work focused on bird reproduction, a subject of interest for evolutionary biologists, but also for birdkeepers. When a group of the hobbyists invited me to make a visit and tell them about my research, I willingly agreed.

The meeting was in a pub in a deprived, and to me scary, part of town. Everyone ignored me until they had consumed a couple pints of beer. We then walked upstairs, where my talk was to take place. There was no introduction—just a long pause followed an irritated voice from back shouting, “Well, go on then!”

I started talking, but the atmosphere was like ice, with everyone leaning back on their chairs as though to keep as far away from me as possible. I’d never felt such hostility. After 30 minutes there was a break for more beer and sausage rolls. I decided to abandon my planned talk. In the second half of the meeting, I instead focused on one aspect of my research, a topic known as “sperm competition” in birds.

Zoology’s new evolutionary approach had also transformed our thinking about sexual selection. Before, for example, biologists had assumed that female animals were sexually monogamous. When they observed a bird copulating promiscuously, they considered it an aberration of no biological significance. But with our new evolutionary spectacles, we saw that such behavior might increase an individual’s success — it would enable it to leave more descendants and more copies of its genes.

And it wasn’t just promiscuity that enhanced an individual’s breeding success. Other traits also increased a male’s chances of fertilizing a female’s eggs—including the size of his testes. Bigger testes mean more sperm, and more sperm mean more lottery tickets in the competition to fertilize a female’s eggs after she has mated with more than one male.

My audience knew all about promiscuity, of course—but not in birds. Now they listened in amazement, leaning forward, eager to discover the seedier side of avian life. The questions came thick and fast at the end of the talk. With a huge sense of relief, I realized I’d made a connection.

Then, as I prepared to leave the meeting, a man came up to me. He told me that he bred bullfinches. He thought their biology might differ from the birds I had discussed in my talk.

Note the differences of sperm morphology—the size and shape of sperm—with the greenfinch sperm (left) and the bullfinch sperm (right).

The males of many small birds, such as robins and finches, have a structure called a cloacal protuberance during the breeding season, which houses the male’s sperm store. Species whose males have large testes also have large cloacal protuberances.

The bullfinch, he said, had no cloacal protuberance. I was taken aback. I had examined dozens of species and never found one with no cloacal protuberance at all. No one else had reported such a finding, either. How could this birdkeeper had noticed something no scientific ornithologist had seen?

I visited the birdkeeper and left with the body of a male bullfinch that had recently died, which the man had kept in his freezer. I took the bird to the university, thawed it out, and dissected it. To my amazement, the bird’s testes were tiny, despite the bird being in prime breeding condition. And sure enough, it had no cloacal protuberance.

With a bit more dissection, I found the bullfinch’s sperm. To my astonishment, they were smaller and simpler than those of any other finch I had ever examined. I began to feel like I had struck gold.

A close-up view of a house sparrow sperm with a helical head (left) and a bullfinch sperm head with a round shape (right).

My bullfinch dissection suggested that male birds’ reproductive organs adapt depending on the likelihood that their partner will be unfaithful. There was already plenty of evidence for male adaptation associated with high risks of female promiscuity—large testes in randier species—but here was evidence it could work the other way too. If a female wasn’t going to play the field, a male didn’t need to waste energy growing bigger testes or producing more sperm.

There was one more discovery from the dissected bullfinch: its sperm was an unusual mix of good and bad: some were perfectly formed, but many had broken tails, deformed heads, or two tails, and were incapable of fertilizing an egg. Why so many hopeless sperm? I conjectured that “quality control” was another thing the monogamous male bullfinch could do without.

With the help of birdkeepers, I began to test my hypotheses. I examined large numbers of male finches during the breeding season, checking the size of their cloacal protuberance and examining their sperm (conveniently shed when the bird pooped, and therefore easily and harmlessly collected).

As I looked at a range of other bird species, a clear pattern emerged: The quality of the sperm a male bird produced correlated with the amount of competition he faced. The bullfinch was humbly endowed—with tiny testes, tiny sperm, and a high proportion of badly made sperm—because he was strictly monogamous. But more promiscuous species like the dunnock—a common bird in English gardens whose females sometimes keep two husbands—were the opposite. The males have huge testes, a very large protuberance, and produce super sleek, high-quality spermatozoa.

All of this discovery came out of one casual conversation outside academia’s ivory tower. The bird breeders helped me obtain samples that would have otherwise been very difficult to get, and by involving them in our evolutionary research, their horizons were broadened too.

People engage with birds in many different ways. We underestimate the knowledge bird breeders have, simply because they are not part of mainstream birding culture.  Intellectual snobbery is the enemy of discovery. Being open to the ideas of others, especially amateurs, can, as I discovered, lead to unexpected and exciting results.

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Proteins are not actually made of coils, arrows, or sheets, but Orme’s drawings of protein structures incorporate green coils (representing alpha-helices, which show how protein subunits connect in spiral formations), red arrows (representing beta-sheets, which are subunits connected in flat formations), and yellow cord (representing links between sheets and coils). Scientific illustrators employ these standard visual motifs to show the general protein structure. Reproduced from Essential Cell Biology (Fifth Edition) by Bruce Alberts, Karen Hopkin, Alexander Johnson, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, and Peter Walter. Copyright © 2019 by Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Karen Hopkin, Alexander Johnson, the Estate of Julian Lewis, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Nicole Marie Odie Roberts, and Peter Walter. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Sometimes, the best point of reference is (at) your fingertip. To help biology students comprehend microscope magnification strengths, Orme’s illustration focuses on an easily-understood object: a thumb. Reproduced from Essential Cell Biology (Fifth Edition) by Bruce Alberts, Karen Hopkin, Alexander Johnson, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, and Peter Walter. Copyright © 2019 by Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Karen Hopkin, Alexander Johnson, the Estate of Julian Lewis, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Nicole Marie Odie Roberts, and Peter Walter. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

It’s easier to understand a figure when an illustrator relates it to something else. Here, seeing planes drawn through a mouse’s body helps students understand the anatomy of the human brain, above. Courtesy of Nigel Orme, from Principles of Neurobiology, Luo et. al, published by Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

How does an artist illustrate the changes that occur as molecules pass in and out of a cell, through the cell membrane? Here, Orme represents cell membranes as “boxes” stacked into shelves, and molecules moving in and out of the shelves as “balls.” Mathematical notations describe the “boxes” at various states, over time. Courtesy of Nigel Orme, from Physical Biology of the Cell, Philips et. al, published by Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Illustrators work closely with scientists to puzzle out the best presentation for difficult concepts. Here, Orme’s sketches appear alongside an author’s attempt to explain pores in a cell membrane. The diagram that resulted from their work shows a section of a cell membrane, with open and closed pores and surrounding proteins. Courtesy of Nigel Orme, from Physical Biology of the Cell, Philips et. al, published by Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Some scientific figures are intuitive, such as this one illustrating Pavlovian conditioning in a dog. Courtesy of Nigel Orme, from Principles of Neurobiology, Luo et. al, published by Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

I graduated from art school in a muddle. All I’d ever really wanted to do was draw, and I had done so on every sheet of paper that came within range of my pencil. But suddenly, it all felt very self-indulgent. I felt I should do something meaningful with my art and somehow give something back. I sincerely believe in the intellectual value of art in our culture, but I was looking for something more concrete. What could I do with my art to really make the world a better place?

Fresh out of my program, I found a job working in a government design office. One day, the manager came over to my desk with a task he thought I’d enjoy: creating an instruction leaflet for the Overseas Development Department explaining how to build a brick kiln. The leaflet was to be distributed to remote villages in West Africa to people who didn’t share a common written language, so I would have to convey information entirely through illustration and without any words. I had to include two figures, a man and a boy, who were to act as the “measuring sticks,” offering an idea of the scale of the structure. I also couldn’t employ perspective in my drawings; I was told African art mostly doesn’t use perspective, the drawing technique through which an artist makes one end of an object smaller to indicate that it is further away from the viewer. Africans looking at a drawing of a kiln that used perspective might think that one end of the kiln should be built smaller than the other.

This was an epiphany moment for me. I realized the real power of art. Here was a message that only illustration could deliver. This was my purpose!

It was just a few months later that I met Keith Roberts, a plant biologist, renowned science writer, and talented artist, who was helping a publisher create meaningful figures for several scientific book projects and was looking for an artist to ease the workload. We’ve worked together now for over 30 years. I’ve built a career as a science illustrator, helping to educate the next generation of biologists, doctors, physicists, surgeons, and more.

I should say at this point that I have no science training whatsoever. People often say to me, “Well, you must have learned so much science over that time.” The fact is that what I’ve really learned is how to ask questions of scientists. I need to understand the logic of scientific concepts so that I can visualize them and come up with narratives and figures to explain them to others. It can be a complicated process, but in the end, my scientist collaborators and I always find a common language. I’ll sit with them at the beginning of their project, or at least at the beginning of the art process, and sketch away as they talk. Generally, they are extremely patient with me, explaining over and over what it is they want me to draw until I understand the concept.

I’ve found the process to be particularly challenging when I work with physicists, whose idea of an illustration is often an equation rather than an image—but this makes physics figures some of the most rewarding projects to work on. When I worked on Physical Biology of the Cell, the physicists writing the book wanted to convey to biologists, “Look, everything you understand about biology is underpinned by physics and math. And a grasp of those subjects will enable you to maybe see your biology in a different way.” So, to make the concepts real for biologists, we had to come up with graphics that had the simplicity and clarity of typical biological illustrations, which are usually either a picture of something or a schematic diagram of an action, and then superimpose the physics and math. The process can be a revelation for the author as well as their intended audience. One of my physics friends told me that making a figure together and visualizing the math led him to understand a familiar concept from physics in a completely different way. In his mind, the visual description linked ideas that he had previously only considered separately. Neither of us could have anticipated that.

It’s remarkable to me that scientists receive absolutely no training in visual communication. Their professional reputations rest on the papers they publish and the lectures they give, and they must illustrate both with coherent figures. Yet, they are expected to somehow learn the tricks of the art trade by magic, picking up complex skills by osmosis, or by watching their perplexed peers stumbling along, trying to do the same.

When I worked with professors over the years, I often thought that I should write a course to teach science students the basics of visual communication; in 2014, with Jané Kondev, a friend and physics professor at Brandeis University and artist/educator Maddy Pikarsky, I finally did. Our week-long course includes lectures on the history of art, graphics, communication, and perception, together with practical drawing exercises, that help budding scientists look at, think about, and design clear, informative visuals. Helping students express their science more clearly and concisely, and have fun with drawing at the same time, has been incredibly rewarding.

At the start, I suffered from imposter syndrome. Sitting at a desk with some of the biggest names in science can be very daunting. But I’ve found that specialists at the top of their own professions often embrace art and become very engaged in the process of making figures. Perhaps it’s because they respect and understand the teaching power of a good illustration. Perhaps it’s because they can tell that the process of building thoughtful figures is a genuine and substantial investment in their book—not just some robotic step on a production line.

People often claim they cannot draw. The first question to ask is, “When did you last try?” (The answer is usually “in high school,” when they were obliged to.) Most people would surprise themselves if they saw how well they could draw once they practiced. If you want to be good at anything, you have to do it, do it again, and then do it some more.

Take a pocket sketchbook and a pencil and draw for five to 10 minutes every day. By the end of a month you’ll be amazed at what you are capable of. And you may just start to realize the real power of art.

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For the last five years, I’ve researched Valley fever at a multidisciplinary lab at the University of California, Merced. This experience has convinced me that for my work to pay the greatest dividends for society—and to do the most to fight this terrible disease—it must take place in direct conversation with community members, clinicians, industry, and policymakers.

Valley fever is a respiratory disease caused by the Coccidioides soil fungus, which is common in the American Southwest, including Arizona and California’s Central Valley. People who work with soil in agricultural fields, construction, and landscaping are particularly at risk. Symptoms resemble those of respiratory diseases like the common cold or flu: coughs, chest pains, fevers, and body aches. This can make swift and accurate diagnosis difficult. Valley fever is estimated to kill about 200 people per year, though the true number is probably higher. In California’s Central Valley, infection rates are 90 times higher than they are in the northern part of the state—a disparity that is exacerbated by the region’s low ratio of physicians to patients.

The heavy burden of the disease in the Central Valley created the impetus for an unusual interdisciplinary collaboration between clinicians, researchers, community members, educators, and local policymakers. In 2018, two state legislators from the Central Valley city of Bakersfield, Vince Fong and Rudy Salas, proposed a $7 million bill to research and raise awareness about the disease. The bill included $3 million for the University of California to share funds between major research groups, allowing scientists who had been competitors to become collaborators—and to reach out to community partners as well. Working together, seven labs from five UC campuses split up the funding allocation.

I first experienced this new, inclusive dynamic as a grad student, when I attended a Valley fever health symposium hosted by the Bakersfield Disease Group, a local advocacy group, in 2018. As I took my seat, I noticed that the 70 or so attendees included folks in pressed suits and people in t-shirts and jeans; some showed up in work clothes, with mud still on their boots. Local elected officials updated us on legislation in the works to promote better public health education through schools and doctors’ offices. Clinical and biomedical researchers presented their work, and took audience questions. Valley fever survivors told personal stories about the difficulty of getting a diagnosis and dealing with medical bills. One described how they could barely sit up most days and rarely got out of bed.

After the programs wrapped, the symposium set up a dedicated time and space for everyone to collaborate—a ritual that made communication the norm, rather than something individuals had to seek out. It was a model of open collaboration, grounded in our common goal of fighting Valley fever.

A month later, I joined the lab of UC Merced immunologist Katrina Hoyer—who had long sought to bring in diverse voices and had lobbied for the increased state funding—as her first Valley fever graduate student researcher. The symposium was on my mind as I outlined my thesis and planned experiments. Now that I had directly seen how the disease affected individuals in the Central Valley, the magnitude of what I wanted to accomplish weighed on me: I wanted my work to make a tangible impact on the community I resided in, and I wanted it to happen during my graduate career, not decades down the line.

At the 63rd Coccidioidomycosis Meeting, at UC Davis in 2019, I came to realize how the collaborative environment could make me a more effective researcher. After my first presentation on immune responses that follow inhalation of the fungi, a doctor treating patients at UC Davis’s Center for Valley Fever challenged some of my descriptions and data.

This, of course, was stressful for a new graduate student. But the physician followed up afterwards, and contextualized his question: If my immune cell definitions did not make sense to healthcare professionals working directly with patients, it would limit the applicability of my work.

I had originally thought of my data as something only scientists could use and appreciate. Until that data culminated into a body of knowledge “big enough” or “significant enough,” it would remain too specific, too esoteric, for anyone else to find it useful. But this interaction with a senior clinician taught me that conducting “good science” was more than following protocol—it meant making science that others could immediately use, too. I needed to be more critical of how I was interpreting and presenting the research. My work could have much more reach and impact if I used accessible language. This lesson was invaluable, and I don’t think it would’ve been possible if it wasn’t for the collaborative learning environment that Valley fever fosters.

The study of Valley fever is characterized by a sense of urgency. More people are moving into regions where the fungus is endemic, and the fungus itself is expanding its range. When I first entered graduate school, I was convinced I would remain in academia for my career, but thinking about Valley fever’s increasing impacts made me anxious to do more. Seeing my impatience, Dr. Hoyer steered me towards places where I could provide direct service to the community. Though I was only required to give two public talks for my graduate program requirements, by the time I finished I had given about 15: workshops on an introduction to fungi with excited elementary students, research updates with community educators, and policy presentations to local elected officials.

The collaborative community around Valley fever inspired me to leap into the gap between science and policy. Tests and treatments for this disease may be years away. So, I’ve come to believe that the most pragmatic thing I can do in the meantime is to get involved in science communication and policy, and to continue reaching out to diverse groups of stakeholders.

This approach offers benefits across the board. Funders have the potential to transform research impact by involving diverse communities in deciding what research is conducted. Policymakers can look for ways to ensure that disease research stays attuned to community needs. And researchers can begin to build deliberate places for public discussion into conferences, meetings, and even at their home institutions. Our work would benefit from creating shared, “sacred” time for collaboration, instead of squeezing in such conversations in a hurried and rushed manner, between other obligations. And rather than gearing these social spaces only towards researchers and their work, we should invite industry, policymakers, and community members to join as collaborators rather than merely as vendors or passive listeners.

As both Valley fever and COVID have demonstrated, infectious disease impacts all parts of daily life; the response must also be multifaceted, encompassing research, education, policy, healthcare, manufacturing, distribution, and the broader community. The sheer scale of the task implies the need for broad and diverse communication and collaboration across all parties involved, and researchers like me should not wait passively for outside institutions to take the lead. We must foster strong dialogue between traditionally separated parties. The future of science is in all of our hands.

The post How Valley Fever Brings People Together appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Tattoos and medicine may seem an unlikely pairing, but medical tattoos are nothing new. Religious tattoos of ancient Egyptians honored the gods and, possibly, directed divine healing to ailing body parts. Circa 150 CE, Galen, a Greek physician working in the Roman Empire, tattooed pigment onto patients’ corneas to reduce glare and improve their eyesight. In the past century, more and more people have tattooed their medical histories, such as blood type, hereditary conditions, and even medical requests such as “do not resuscitate,” on their wrists and chests. Modern doctors have also used tattoos in reconstructive and cosmetic procedures to disguise scars and restore the appearance of lost body parts, such as nipples for mastectomy patients.

Today, that history comes full circle—as researchers now try to determine if tattooing could be used as a medical tool, giving healthcare providers a better way to administer drugs and vaccines.

It was only recently, in 2018, that scientists figured out exactly what happens in the immune system when you get a tattoo. They identified macrophages, a type of immune cell, as critical players in the process. Macrophages are part of the first responder unit of immune cells, also known as innate immunity. To understand what macrophages do, look no further than the Greek roots of its name: Macro–phage means “large-eater.” These pliable cells, which develop deep in our bone marrow, travel through the bloodstream and target microbial invaders in tissues, engulfing and “eating” them through a process called phagocytosis, thus clearing infections. Often, the response is so fast and effective that we don’t realize we’ve been infected at all.

Macrophages are also the accomplices that make tattoos permanent. When a tattoo needle punctures the skin, it tears apart the skin, fat, and connective tissue in its path. As they’re damaged, these cells release chemical distress signals, which travel into the bloodstream and surrounding tissue. The signals attract immune cells to the damage site and put adjacent cells on high alert. Depending on its size and complexity, a typical tattoo will inflict hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of these puncture wounds. Macrophages near the tattoo site, ever on the prowl, ingest any mysterious, foreign substance they happen to find—in this case, targeting the ink the tattoo artist has applied with the tip of their needle. In a twist that researchers still don’t fully understand, the macrophage “eats” the ink but cannot destroy it (one theory is that tattoo inks, which nowadays are usually carbon-based and suspended in a carrier fluid such as distilled water, isopropyl alcohol, or glycerin, are simply resistant to the cell’s enzymatic breakdown strategies).

The macrophage then does one of two things: 1) carry the ink away to a nearby lymph node for disposal or 2) sit there. “Sitting there” is a strategy macrophages sometimes employ with trickier foes. Macrophages and other immune cells will try to engulf as much of the invading material as possible but can’t fully destroy it, so the macrophages hunker down and form a blockade structure with their bodies, called a granuloma, to isolate the pathogen from the uninfected tissues (the macrophage motto: “If you can’t destroy them, trap them.”). When you get a tattoo, some of your macrophages sit and hold the ink to “protect” you, in the process becoming inadvertent guardians, preserving your tattoo design.

Your tattoo design, then, is an artful, exterior display of your body’s immune response.

Tattoo artists have harnessed the body’s defense network to inscribe and preserve art within your skin. It begs the question: Why can’t researchers leverage the same approach to advance medical treatments?

In 2016, the American Academy of Dermatology estimated that one out of every four people in the U.S. is impacted by skin ailments such as microbial infections or various cancers. Another study, in 2019, reported that Americans spend $13.8 billion dollars battling skin and soft tissue infections each year. Physicians today treat serious skin infections by giving patients intravenous or oral medication, which can be costly and can cause side effects. Minor infections may respond to topical ointments and creams, but these don’t always work well because the drugs may have to penetrate the skin barrier to reach the target site, resulting in variable absorption.

Tattooing medications into infected tissues might work better. A fluid dynamics study from 2021 (preliminary version here) used a gelatin block to simulate flesh, and characterized how needles deliver ink to skin. As a needle punctures tissue it creates a brief opening, which draws ink in as the wound closes back. Repetitive needling over the same puncture increases the total volume drawn in. The mechanism yields interesting possibilities for difficult-to-deliver drugs and vaccines.

In a proof-of-concept study using laboratory mice with cutaneous leishmaniasis, a parasitic skin infection marked by inflamed lesions, researchers administered an anti-parasitic drug using three routes: administering it topically as a cream, injecting it into the torso with hypodermic needles (the kind widely used in healthcare) to mimic drug circulation through the bloodstream, and using a commercial tattoo needle to inject medicine directly into the infection site. Tattooing treatment directly into the wound decreased parasite numbers within infected tissues and decreased lesion size and tissue inflammation more effectively than the other techniques. It ensured high drug concentration at the target site, while using less of the drug than other methods. Researchers and pharma companies are also evaluating a similar mechanism, microneedles, for treating skin infections. Microneedle patches for common woes such as acne are already available on the consumer market.

Tattoos may also ease the delivery of vaccinations to prevent disease. Today, most vaccines are administered by hypodermic needles that inject into the muscle. The thicker the vaccine, the larger the needle—and often, the more painful the injection. Human skill impacts pain levels, too. An injection may hurt more if an administrator is inexperienced, and doesn’t know, for instance, how much pressure to apply to the plunger. Tattooing eliminates such problems. Tattoo needles are small compared to traditional hypodermic needles, and are designed to puncture the skin superficially, potentially eliminating the discomfort and pain associated with intramuscular injections. And since puncture frequency is automated by machinery and puncture wounds naturally draw in fluid, tattooing may also reduce human error. One research cohort has designed microneedle patches with needles coated with vaccine to “tattoo” it into the recipient.  Such designs, which can be stuck to the skin like a simple adhesive bandage, can eliminate administration problems created by human error as well as the risk of disease transmission from needle handling and biohazard waste disposal. Solid vaccine patches are also easier to transport and store, as they take up less space than liquid-based vaccines.

It behooves the medical and research community to innovate when existing techniques fail; as a tattooed immunologist myself, it seems to me that developing tattoos for medical applications just makes sense. Tattoos, research, and medicine share a rich history, and the convergence of tattoos and science is a continuation of the human desire to explore and innovate—and beautify and prolong our lives.

If medicine is an art, then art too can be medicine.

The post Could a Tattoo Cure What Ails You? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other, which is why we have honored authors who explore these themes for over a dozen years now. Whether it’s a public health emergency or a political crisis, current events continue to make our mission feel increasingly urgent.

Because community is such a vast field of inquiry that can be explored in myriad ways, we accept submissions on a broad array of topics and themes from many disciplines of investigation. The 12 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. They are historians and journalists, economists and philosophers. Previous winners have studied a single location (whether that’s Hattiesburg, Mississippi during the Jim Crow era or an Eastern European border town in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust) as well as phenomena, including cooperation, technology, and morality.

As with everything else Zócalo features, we are on the lookout for that rare combination of brilliance and clarity, excellence and accessibility. The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes chief executive officer Leticia Rhi Buckley, Texas Tribune editor in chief Sewell Chan, former California governor Gray Davis, The Sum of Us author and 2022 Zócalo Book Prize winner Heather McGhee, Goldhirsh Foundation president Tara Roth, USC professor of American studies & ethnicity and history George J. Sanchez, and Zócalo trustee and Boeing engineer Reza Zaidi.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and speak at a public program, including an award ceremony, where they will deliver a lecture based on their work, and participate in an interview, in Los Angeles in spring 2023. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our short list. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit this year is October 28, 2022 at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

Zócalo Public Square
c/o Book Prize Committee
1111 South Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Our past winners are:

• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize Honors Explorations of Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We are on the lookout for that rare combination of creativity and clarity, excellence and evocation. The prize interprets “place” in many ways: A location may possess historical, cultural, political, or personal importance, and may be literal, imaginary, or metaphorical.

Our 12th annual winner will be selected by the Zócalo staff, working in conjunction with a poetry prize selection committee. The winner will receive $1,000 and will have the opportunity to deliver their poem at the Zócalo Book Prize event in the spring. Zócalo will also publish the poem on our site alongside an interview with the poet. In addition, we plan to recognize our honorable mention submissions.

Screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney returns to sponsor Zócalo’s literary prize program, which also includes the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize.

Please read and enjoy the poems from our 11 past winners, which travel to San Diego, Ohio, and Mexico, to a kitchen, a beach, and a gas station parking lot, and to the landscapes of these writers’ imaginations, memories, and dreams.

• Chelsea Rathburn, “8 a.m., Ocean Drive” (2022)
• Angelica Esquivel, “La Mujer” (2021)
• Jai Hamid Bashir, “Little Bones” (2020)
• Erica Goss, “The State of Jefferson” (2019)
• Charles Jensen, “Tucson” (2018)
• Matt Sumpter, “No World” (2017)
• Matt Phillips, “Crossing Coronado Bridge” (2016)
• Gillian Wegener, “The Old Mill Café” (2015)
• Amy Glynn, “Shoreline” (2014)
• Jia-Rui Chong Cook, “Fault” (2013)
• Jody Zorgdrager, “Coming Back, It Comes Back” (2012)

Submission Guidelines

For consideration, please send up to three poems to poetry@zocalopublicsquare.org.

Please attach your poem(s) as a single Word document to your email. Include your name, address, phone number, and email address on each poem. Personal identification will be removed prior to review by the judges. We will accept online submissions only, and receipt will be acknowledged at the time of submission.

Eligibility

Poems must be original and previously unpublished work. We accept up to three poems from each writer as well as simultaneous submissions; let us know immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

Judging

Entries will be judged based on originality of ideas, theme, and style. Judging is at the sole discretion of Zócalo Public Square and our poetry prize committee. The winner will be announced in spring 2023, and the winning poet will receive $1,000, a published interview, and an opportunity for a public reading hosted by Zócalo. The winning poem will be published on zocalopublicsquare.org. We will also be celebrating our honorable mention submissions.

Conditions

The winning poem and honorable mentions become the property of Zócalo Public Square, but the writers may republish their poems at a later date with Zócalo’s permission. By entering the contest, the entrants grant Zócalo the right to publish and distribute their poems for media and publicity purposes, along with the poets’ name and photograph. Poets will be contacted by Zócalo before we publish any submission.

The post The 2023 Zócalo Poetry Prize Celebrates Poems of Place appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.