DataCafé

Science Communication with physicist Laurie Winkless, author of "Sticky" & "Science and the City"

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A key part of the scientific method is communicating the insights to an audience, for any field of research or problem context. This is where the ultimate value comes from: by sharing the cutting-edge results that can improve our understanding of the world and help deliver new innovations in people's lives. Effective science communication sits at the intersection of data, research, and the art of storytelling.

In this episode of the DataCafé we have the pleasure of welcoming Laurie Winkless, a physicist, author and science communications expert. Laurie has extensive experience in science journalism, having written numerous fascinating articles for Forbes Magazine, Wired, Esquire, and The Economist. She has also authored two science books which we will talk about today: 

Laurie tells us about the amazing insights in her books from her research, interviews and discussions with leading scientists around the world. She gives us an idea of how the scientific method sits at the core of this work. Her efforts involve moving across many complicated data landscapes to uncover and articulate the key insights of the scientists working in these fields. And she does this through the art of storytelling, in a manner that can capture people's imagination whilst educating and surprising them at the same time.


Interview guest: Laurie Winkless, physicist, author, science communicator. Contactable via her website, and on twitter, mastodon, and linkedin.

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Thanks for joining us in the DataCafé. You can follow us on twitter @DataCafePodcast and feel free to contact us about anything you've heard here or think would be an interesting topic in the future.

Jason:

Joining me in the data Cafe today is Laurie wingless, a physicist, author, and science communicator. Laurie has a background in physics physics degree from Trinity College Dublin, which is where we first met. She then went on to work in the UK National Physical Laboratory as a research scientist specializing in functional materials. She's an amazing science communicator who's written a really impressive number of fascinating blogs, articles, publications across the likes of Forbes, wired and Esquire. And what's really impressive is published two science books, most recently sticky the secret science of surfaces. And her first book science and the city was on the mechanics behind the metropolis. Laurie, it's such a pleasure to welcome you to the data Cafe today.

Laurie:

It's so lovely to be here, Jason, thanks. Thanks for waiting for the invite.

Jason:

So I wanted to talk first about sticky. And this is really cool. The secret science of surfaces, which all around us in the world, and we interact with them all the time, loads of fascinating case studies throughout your book. And what surprised me in that context a little bit is that there's still this kind of ongoing discovery in defining what is stickiness, even the friction is such an important concept in physics. Can you tell me a bit about why this is? So in the kind of challenges in this field of research?

Laurie:

Yeah, I think the, the main reason really I call the book Sticky is because it's a word that we as humans, regardless of our scientific background, have this kind of instinctive understanding of or have a relationship with. So you know, I've often asked people when I, when I say the word sticky, what do you think of, and someone might say, Oh, my kids with their sticky hands after eating something sweet, or, you know, like the the adhesives and paints in my garage, you know, people have this relationship with the word sticky, so we understand what it means. But then, when we put our scientist hats on, there's no scientific definition for the word sticky. You know, there isn't a single metric that we can use to describe something as sticky. It's not something like density, you know, where we have an actual measurement, we have a real number, a real metric that we can use. And we can then compare things in terms of their density, or their math or whatever, you know, their crystal structure. So you know, we've got all of these definitions that we can use in science. But the word sticky is not one of them. And therefore, the kind of interaction between between materials is also one that is really difficult, but impossible, in fact, to summarize, in a single metric, now, it's not to say we don't have any metrics, we have lots of lots of things, like the word viscosity, for example, that will tell us something about how a fluid will move, or how a liquid will interact. So something that's more viscous is kind of more sticky in inverted commas, you know, it has this resistance to flow. So maybe that's a metric that we could use, and we can use in some contexts or thinking about stickiness. But then what about between dry surfaces, or solid surfaces? How do we describe that, and you said, friction, right, we talk about friction all the time, all the time. With things like the coefficient of friction, that's probably another metric that maybe we could use to describe how solid surfaces interact. So the coefficient of friction being a measure of how hard or how easy it is for two surfaces to slide along one another. That could maybe be considered, I would argue that to be considered one of these measures that helps us to describe how surfaces interact. But that itself is a weird metric. And this isn't something I had fully grasped, actually, to be honest, before I started researching this book, which is that the coefficient of friction is not something that we can predict. We can't take everything we know on the atomic level about two materials, and put it into a series of equations and then out pops a coefficient of friction, we can't do that we don't have that ability to do that. That number is something that's always been measured experimentally. So it's always been an average. And when I think about how often I used coefficients of friction in different equations, or in different contexts, we don't have a way to, you know, we don't have a way to calculate this from first principles. And I just loved that idea that we had this we have this fundamental, these fundamental kind of forces and interactions that define so much of how we move through the world as as people, but also how much we move through the world of scientists and people who actually do scientific research. And yet, there's still all these quite big gaps or approximations that we have to use. And that was kind of were the beginnings of the idea of a book about friction, which is effectively what's sticky is came about the kind of existence of these terms in the real world in inverted commas, and, and their absence from the scientific literature.

Jason:

There was a really nice example that you gave in a talk with the Royal Institute or

Laurie:

Yeah, the Royal Institution. Yeah, that was a real pinch me.

Jason:

Where you talked about the different temperatures of ice rink, depending on the different sports. And that was really impressive, because of the different ways that the athletes can almost tell what how cold the ice is, depending on the sport.

Laurie:

Yeah, I found that might as well. And I think it was something I kept coming back to in different contexts to, you know, we can have this instinctive understanding of something incredibly see this with crafts, people, you know, we see this with glass blowers. And they understand the intricacies of how glass moves in a way that scientists it's a different type of understanding, it's no less real, it's no less important. It's no less valid, it's just different. And when I spoke to both athletes and icemakers, you know, because there are like professional icemakers, who, who the Olympics fly over to each games to set up all the rinks, they have that instinctive understanding of the ice. And an athlete can tell you from almost the moment, especially like speed skaters where you want to keep friction as low as possible. They can, they can tell you that it feels like it's fast ice, or the ice makers will sometimes tell you that they can hear when the athletes are training on the rink, whether it's going to be a good race, like so they have all of this understanding. And they, they have known how to create ice. And these rinks are very thin, the layers of ice that are on the Olympic rank are much thinner than you might imagine. And they're built up Layer Layer Layer by layer over days and days for a single rank. But they've known how to do that. And they've managed to, you know, change their recipes. And they use very specific types of water and all of that stuff. But none of them would describe themselves as a scientist, at least none of the ones I would, I would have interviewed. And yet, it's only really in fairly recent years that we have been able to fully explain and understand, you know, from a scientific point of view, why ice is slippery. And how the surface the the slipperiness of the surface of ice, the friction on the surface of ice changes with temperature. That's pretty recent that we've actually managed to put numbers and an information behind that these ice makers have been doing it for like, a century.

Jason:

That's amazing. Yeah, I was really surprised when you said that the colder the ice, the less slippy It was, yeah, really interested me.

Laurie:

Yeah, like ice that's minus 100 degrees C is like a very rough surface, it's, it has very, very high friction, it's not at all slippery. I mean, we can't we don't really interact with ice at that temperature. But within the ranges that we usually operate, or we usually kind of interact with ice, you're kind of between maybe minus 10 and zero degrees C, that's kind of where most interactions, human interactions with ice. Ice is very slippery indeed. So I yeah, I find that really interesting. You know, it what seems like a silly question, why is like slippery, actually ended up leading me down a really interesting path. And I learned heaps.

Jason:

That's the bit where you ask the question, and this is uncovering the scientific method. And where that comes into all of the research that both you're doing in the pursuit of the book, and all of the scientists are doing in the pursuit of stickiness and the fields that they're working in, going through the data collection and analysis, the experimentation, testing hypotheses, building models, running simulations, like what particularly impressive or surprising scientific breakthrough stood out to you when writing sticky.

Laurie:

are heaps of them, like in the in the sense that I went into this with some ideas of topics that I felt like were really well understood. Right. So I was like, there's some of these topics that I'm going to cover that I know will have big question marks at the end of them. You know, I know that we don't really fully understand, like, we don't know how to predict the coefficient of friction, right. I knew though, I knew that was a question. But then there were other topics where I thought, oh, yeah, all the sciences totally. So enough on this one. So that would be like a nice, straightforward research and writing process. Almost always, I would speak to people and eventually I'd keep asking questions. And eventually they'd be like, Yeah, we don't really understand. Like, I know. I wanted something nice. I'm one of those in some ways is like the gecko, which is the star of one of the chapters in the book. And in that chapter, it reflects my own research experience was I wanted to go through history and see how we used to think the gecko could create these amazing feats like they can climb almost any surface you can imagine. They could do it really quickly, very fast, very lightweight. How are they doing it? Alright, so I wanted to go back through and see what was wrong. You know what The previous theories were with the goal of getting to the line. Now we know precisely everything exactly correct about the gecko. And I didn't really get to that end point. You know, there were people thought there might have been, it might act like a suction cup, maybe that's its feet are kind of creating the vacuum in there. Maybe they were covered in these kind of micro hooks, like if any of your listeners are climbers, climbing boot, crampons tend to just have hard hooks on them. There was a theory for a long time that maybe that's how the gecko did it. And that was it went to Velcro. Yeah, exactly Velcro, like, there's all these ideas that people have tested. And then disproven, to get to the point at which we, we kind of now have a fairly complete understanding of the gecko. And mostly that's been because of microscopes and our development of increasingly, you know, high resolution microscopes like the scanning electron microscope, that was really the first time and that's not very long ago, right? That was really the first time that people could zoom in far enough on the geckos foot to realize that what agak was actually doing is it's tapping into Vander Waals interaction. It's covered in these hairs, its toes are covered in these hairs, those hairs have lots of split ends. And the ends of those split ends are just a few atoms and left. So a gecko can get its foot into contact, that's about one nanometer away from the atoms in the wall. And, you know, I was like, Whoa, this is this is crazy. And then I met engineers who are trying to kind of tap into some of that understanding and seeing if they can reproduce some of those features, to to create, you know, better grippers or Yeah, claiming robots or anything like that. And they've had huge success. But they haven't gotten anywhere near the level of detail or intricacy, we can't create anything as, as complex. And as detailed and hierarchical structures, we can create them as small as the gecko has them. You know, we're way way off that. And I didn't think that was true. I thought we were like, Yeah, we got it. We know exactly how it works. I find that quite surprising. And maybe it's just because I'm not a biologist, I hadn't put a lot of thought into how lizards how geckos work. But I find it surprising that even though we now have engineers who have who have successfully tapped into a lot of heavy geckos foot operates and have been using it on the International Space Station. There's even a couple of companies who've developed these grippers to apply in factories where you're lifting awkwardly shaped objects up, you know, moving them around. We're still nowhere near getting to full grips of high jackals. footworks. And I loved that. Yeah.

Jason:

Because there was a chap in your book who tried to climb up the side of a building by replicating that process. But yeah, he was kind of risking himself doing it. There.

Laurie:

He's a really interesting guy. Eliot hawks, you know, he developed and it did work. Yeah, he really did scale the side of a building, like, probably more like spider man, really than a gecko in that sense, you know? But yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. I trust in the engineering of the science, but I'm not sure if they handed me the climbers, if I would have mentored it myself. Yeah,

Jason:

he's really taking the experiment to the extreme there. Oh, that's really cool. There's loads of examples like this in the book that made me like think, wow, what is it in nature that we're trying to replicate, and for example, flight, and, you know, we see animals flying, and then we replicate flight and have to overcome things like aerodynamic drag, but even more like real world applications for anybody who plays sports. So things like golf balls flying through the air at curling, as a sports and swimming. And while people were swimming, and a couple of things that stood out to me, like when I use post-its, it's they don't leave a residue behind, or when I use superglue, it doesn't stick to the inside of its container. It's like all of these kinds of real world and almost fun to think about examples. And then the important ones about like vehicles needing to break and understanding earthquakes, for example, yeah, what are the kinds of big impacts and future developments that all of this knowledge is going to head towards?

Laurie:

Yeah, that's a huge question. And I think I think that it's the main thing for me, is that we're starting to understand things like friction at a different scale than we used to understand this. You know, we've been very good at manipulating friction, always, you know, since for millennia, we've been masters of being able to reduce friction where we needed to, and to increase friction where we needed to do that because friction isn't always bad. You know, sometimes we think of it as just a form of energy loss. But you know, you mentioned vehicles we need for Shouldn't in order to travel fast, we need the tire to grip in order to be able to travel forward. But I think what's been interesting in the last few years, and I'm hopeful that will relate to a real kind of game change in the world of friction, and tribology, which is really the study of friction, is we now are developing a fairly sophisticated, still incomplete, but fairly sophisticated understanding of what happens way down at the nanoscale. So, you know, you think about friction, things like friction, and then, you know, loads of aspects of thermodynamics to, really, it's about statistics, right? You need big numbers of things. And that gives you the information that you need. But what happens, like when you have just a couple of atoms, you know, if you've got like atomically, flat surfaces, and you're sliding them along one another, why do we still see something that looks a bit like friction? Why do we see a resistive force like what the hell is going on? So I, that in the very last chapter of the book, I kind of delved into that very murky, murky world, not sure if I came out entirely on solid from it. But you know, that idea of what, what are the, what's the fundamental mechanism behind friction. And there are loads of researchers doing interesting research at that scale, using things like the atomic force microscope, excuse me, to slide across atomically flat surfaces, or very perfectly engineered surfaces that are steps so we can understand how the tip interacts as it goes down to step versus up the step. And, you know, we're really starting to understand what is going on way down there at the atomic scale. And what I'm hopeful about, and what I hope happens is that we started to bridge the gap between those two areas of knowledge, this macroscale understanding of friction that we've had for centuries, and has allowed us to develop things like lubricants that we can use on Mars rovers, that's like totally normal thing that we can do now as humans, which is crazy. And now we're starting to understand what happens way down at the atomic scale. If we can bridge that gap, there is no reason that we couldn't develop surfaces that are incredibly efficient at sliding across one another, like maybe we could do away with lubricants entirely. And that wouldn't be a bad thing. Because a lot of lubricants are made from fossil fuels. You know, could we find ways to control friction? If we really understand that at that scale? And we really understand that that scale? Could we develop a unified model that would allow us to actually transition that information from way down at the atomic scale to the industrial scale? And that is the big question. Like that was one thing that a lot of people a lot of trade biologists who I spoke to, were fascinated by bridging that gap and, and what opportunities that might open up to us. So that's definitely something I'm keeping an eye on, for sure.

Jason:

Amazing. And part of what struck me by talking through the process of like earthquakes, and yeah, what a big impact they have reminded me of your book science and the city and how important the design of cities is because we're putting those on a world and a platform that can shake and shake dramatically with, you know, devastating consequences, potentially. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about the amazing engineering that goes into the infrastructure that powers our metropolises, and what kind of discoveries you made writing science in the city?

Laurie:

Yeah, for sure. I might even start kind of I'll tie back to your question about earthquakes, because I hadn't really thought about the well, you know, I thought about the challenges of building infrastructure in seismic areas, on a very hand wavy level, you know, and it was only when I started looking into it, that I realized that it's actually a New Zealander who invented what's probably the most like ubiquitous, what we call base isolation piece of infrastructure, and they're called led rubber bearings. And that kind of tells you what they are. But his name was Bill Robinson, and I, I'd never heard of him before ever in my life. And he's his work and his engineering and his invention has saved I would say 10s of 1000s of lives, because these lead rubber bearings are used as a basis as a lot of very large structures. So in Wellington, where I live now, there's a museum called to Papa and to Papa is like a huge museum on the waterfront in Wellington, and it's quite a new I think it was like 1980s or something that it was built in. And I and it actually is built on these LED rubber bearings. And what they are are these kinds of layers of steel and rubber and steel and rubber. Like I said, and which were many, many layers deep, with a central core of lead, and the laminated layers kind of act as a spring. And they kind of pull the building back if it moves laterally in the quake, but then the lead in the middle, because it's such a soft metal, it kind of acts as the damper. So it kind of dampens the motion because it can, it can flex and flow a little bit. So the combination of those two can give you buildings that can withstand large buildings that can withstand a surprisingly large earthquake. There was one example and I had to look this up, because I couldn't remember what the name of the building was. It's called the telecommunications computer center in Kobe in Japan. And during the 1995 earthquake, that was basically the only building that was left standing. And it used these LED rubber bearings that were invented by this New Zealander who passed away about 10 years ago, and I had never heard of this man. And, and that was generally doing research around cities, I kept, I kept coming across things that I knew I knew nothing about, and also invented by people that I'd never heard of. So that was a really fun part of the process, because I would hope that in writing about cities, and you know, I've written about cities, since science and city came out for Forbes and stuff, writing about this topic, I would hope would introduce people to looking at their city in a slightly different way, you know, just changing the way they view the metropolis. But you know, a lot of the book is also about really historic things like the tube. And yeah, something I hadn't fully kind of appreciated is how much of a role the tube itself played in shaping London. So you know, in the early days, they literally put train stations in the countryside, and give the workers houses near the new station. So the shape, the shape of London is entirely defined by where tube lines were, you know, we think of, you know, you look at Dublin, for example. And we're having to kind of retrofit infrastructure on sometimes challenging streets. But in Victorian London, they were building the infrastructure before they had the houses. So it's, it's quite a different approach. And, and again, that changed that changed the way I thought about cities and urban planning and, and really about how brave we need to be if we want to build cities that are better for people, and more sustainable as we move forward. So they were the kind of themes that I took away from the book, I suppose.

Jason:

Have you been through many earthquakes or what was?

Laurie:

Yeah, a couple of nothing too major. Thankfully, just just the odd little rumble, but everyone has this app on their phone in New Zealand. There's a network of seismic sensors all over the country. And it sends you alerts on your phone. And so everyone's kind of not obsessed with them. But you're just aware, you're just aware of them. So they could feel the little ones you kind of a lot of them you don't even notice because they're very, very small. But yeah, the odd time you'll get one and it feels like you've you know, a very, very big truck has just like rammed into the fence outside your house. Yeah, I don't know. That's the funnest thing to go through. But I've been lucky and haven't Touchwood. Anyway, I haven't been through a series one as yet.

Jason:

Yeah. It's, it's amazing. There's so many cool science, technology and the engineering aspects that you describe in science in the city. And you bring it together. And in one of the later sections called Connect, you highlight the invisible connections as well, that we may not be as clearly obvious to us. And it's kind of summarized as trade communications and food raises questions about information transfer via GPS and satellites, supply chain supply chain networks, and the optimization and global food distribution through reports and we're seeing post pandemic, how damaging some effects and interruptions to that can be. So what key challenges and like aspects of these may become more and more important in the future?

Laurie:

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Jason, I think the pandemic has really highlighted how fragile our global trade network is. There's huge benefits, obviously, to having a much more globalized and much more connected world. But when so much of you know manufacturing, for example, so much of it is kind of concentrated in one part of the world like China, for example. When an event like this happens, and everything grinds to a halt, we don't really have a plan B. And definitely when I've been talking to people even just kind of was my city's hat on, when I've been talking to people in different parts of the world about totally different challenges. One of the things that has been mentioned in lots of contexts to me, is how we're going to start re localizing some aspects of our life. And that might be kind of distributed energy generation, for example. So instead of we're Buying on a, on a centralized grid, we're going to see many more kind of community led grids or solar panels that are based in, in buildings and the building taps into that power or sells off what it doesn't use or combined heat and power plants within within, within a, you know, big skyscraper or whatever, trying to kind of centralized low relocalized some of those aspects and and of course, you think about things like urban farms, or people growing vegetables and things I think we're possibly too far gone to, to move entirely away from a globalized world. But I do think that the pandemic has really shown that we need to have more resilient infrastructure within our local, you know, and I say local with, you know, maybe split the world up into eight or something within closer to home effectively, because as it is, it's just, we're so reliant, often on just one region or one port. In some cases. We've seen that that doesn't really work in in times of crisis. So I definitely when I'm talking to electricity, people thinking about electricity thinking people thinking about food production, about materials production, you know, a lot of the focus is on trying to not just recycle materials, construction materials, but actually really change the way that we build our cities based on materials becoming available when we demolish old buildings. So there's a lot more I've definitely seen, like a general trend of people saying, what aspects of urban life can we kind of re localize to make it a bit more resilient, and feed feed that within a broader global system?

Jason:

Where, and it's bringing to mind the idea of that circular economy? Yeah, head towards ton. I know, as we grow older, and I have more friends who are becoming homeowners, and they talk about like buying solar panels and contributing back to the grid. Those are conversations I never heard of when I was younger, and people wanting allotments to grow their own food. So it's a great initiative that we're seeing.

Laurie:

Totally agree, I have exactly the same as you Jason on that.

Jason:

And as we head towards like this on precedented connectivity, and regenerating so much like tons of data nowadays, and starting to embed Internet of Things, people have wearable tech, we're seeing more and more robotics, artificial intelligence, potentially shaping and changing our lives. And one thing that comes to mind is self driving cars in the future. You paint a really exciting, but also lovely picture of a possible day in the life and a future city at the end of science. What kind of important aspects of AI and future tech, have you come across in your work that will become more prevalent in our everyday lives? And perhaps sooner than we think?

Laurie:

That's a good question. I have, and I'm possibly preaching to the converted here, but I have kind of mixed feelings around big data. And I think that we have such a natural tendency as humans to just want to be constantly gathering information, you know, we need to be gathering information and gathering more data at all times. And actually, it's not always helpful. You know, it's not always Yeah, it doesn't always kind of work. And so I say, I would hope that we will start well, maybe this is really naive of me. But my hope is that we become a bit more discerning with the way that we use data and the way that we collect data. And that we don't move towards a system where those people who are already marginalized are even more marginalized by the fact that information is being gathered on them. And I think as humans, we're pretty, we're pretty terrible at that, you know, we have lots of Silicon Valley bros, who only think about the technology and they don't really think about the implications. They often don't even talk to the people who's, you know, they're pretending or wishing that their technology is going to serve, to see what they actually need. So my hope is that we will get a bit more discerning in that regard. And the data that we are collecting is, is for good reasons. And not just for tracking reasons or for marketing reasons. Like around driver, driverless cars are an interesting one in particular, because I think, actually the barrier there is not technology, the barrier to you know, having autonomous vehicles is regulation. And I don't think it's a bad thing, necessarily, because what we don't want to have is a situation which we've seen multiple times in the last few years as autonomous vehicles have been on streets, where they the computer makes the wrong decision, and they crash into something they crash into someone. And so we really need to get get our stuff together when it comes to regulating autonomous vehicles so that you When, obviously because these cars don't know how to do anything that we don't tell them how to do, right, we have to teach them how to work. So how do we teach them to make a moral decision? What happens if someone is in a car in their autonomous vehicle that's being driven by the by the car itself. And a situation occurs that the car has to make a decision between saving its passenger, or saving someone on the street? That's an impossible position for a computer to be in? So yeah, that's I think, generally. And I think this is possibly my, my mind has changed a little bit since I wrote science and city. Because I've looked into this a bit more now and realize that maybe my naivety was painting, possibly too shiny a picture of of how we use data in cities. So yeah, my hope is that we just become a bit more discerning, with more diverse workforces moving into the tech sector, which is so long overdue. We have many more people arguing for their case and arguing and saying, No, this is not fair, this is going to this is going to, you know, separate out this part of society, this is going to impact these people. So we have many more diverse voices in the room. And I think with that comes better decisions around data, I hope.

Jason:

Yeah, fully, fully agree. I love that point, actually. And it brings me on to the idea of how important the scientific method itself is the application of it. And in all of your work, you are employing the scientific method in highlighting the scientific method as it has been employed by the people who you're talking to in these various fields of research and the work that they are living and breathing. And those scientists and researchers themselves have a diversity of backgrounds and cultures and their own communication styles. And you're bringing that all together and creating this like common theme, especially in these two books that we've talked about. And it's a key aspect of science communication. And I wanted to like just finally ask you, for anybody working in both science and any way with data, delivering insights. Do you have any top tips for how to communicate effectively and successfully?

Laurie:

Yeah, I am. I think if I were to summarize it in one, if I had to give one top tip, because I've been asked before, it's like, what one single thing? Would you say? I'm like, Oh, wow, that's a lot of pressure. Yeah, but I think it's to simplify your message always. We have such, like, and I guess, you know, and especially Irish people, we talk a lot, and we talk around the houses and, and it's part of our culture, and it's part of what makes us who we are. But when we're trying to communicate something important. Often we feel we should pad around it. And actually, in my experience, all that does is dilutes the central message. So the my key tip is to just keep asking yourself, what it is you want to your audience to take away from this interaction. So whether that's in terms of like, infographics or a talk that you're giving, or even, you know, an elevator pitch, you have to give, what is the key message you want them to walk away with. And that should be the central goal, everything else should support you achieving that goal. Every anything beyond that, unfortunately, is extraneous. So you just have to leave it aside if you if your goal is to communicate a specific topic or a specific idea. If your goal in general is to kind of get people interested in engaged in science, that's where you kind of have the opportunity to tell stories. And that's what I see my book says, you know, I get to I get to put the padding in there, I get to faff around in the lab with some scientists or some geologists and see how their equipment works. Because that's painting a picture for my readers, you know, it's taking them with me on this visit and meeting these people with me. Because I'm not the expert, right on any of the topics that I write about, I am not the person doing the research, I am the person more my job I see my job is as someone who can synthesize, you know, gather all this huge amounts of data. And I do very much take a scientific view. Honestly, I think I probably read more research papers to most scientists. You know, I take all this information and try and wrap a story around it so that it's not overwhelming for my readers. But if your goal is to communicate a single idea, unfortunately, you kind of have to move most of that away, you have to pick one very straightforward story, and you have to just zoom in as tightly as you can. So I would always recommend that people even if you're writing a paragraph, I try and I delete full sentences and see if my paragraphs still make sense. It's not that I will have a very short, shorter paragraph by the end but I really challenge myself to just always try and focus on on the single idea because that is what you want. You know if you're trying to get someone to to change their mind like or, or get funding or whatever. Just focus on the single message and keep challenging yourself to simplify, simplify, simplify.

Jason:

That's brilliant. You've immediately got me thinking of the times when somebody asks me to write a report about something, and I just write and write and write and send it off. But if they tell me write it in 200 words, wow, that's the hardware. Yeah. And so everything you've spoke, you said, just speaks to me in that regard. And Laurie, this has been absolutely brilliant, really, really interesting stuff. And you have a website, and you're on Twitter actively on Twitter, if anybody wants to get in touch. How should they reach out to you?

Laurie:

Yeah, Twitter's probably the best because I've never office. So I'm at Laurie L a u r i e _ w i n k l e s s , or my websites, my name also you can find me on there. And I'm on LinkedIn and stuff too. So but yeah, Twitter is where I go to just just talk.

Jason:

Brilliant. That's LaurieWinkless dot com?

Laurie:

Yeah. LaurieWinkless dot com Yeah, my new shiny new website.

Jason:

It's lovely.

Unknown:

Thank you. Brilliant.

Jason:

Laurie, thank you so much for joining us in the data Cafe today. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Laurie:

Thanks, Jason. It's been a real pleasure to hang out with you again.

Jason:

Thanks for joining us today at the data cafe. You can like and review this on iTunes or your preferred podcast provider. Or if you'd like to get in touch. You can email us Jason that data cafe.uk Or Jeremy at data cafe.uk or on Twitter at DataCafé podcast. We'd love to hear your suggestions for future episodes.