Snippets of Science

Hello everyone! Derek here, though you knew that for the simple fact that I’m the only one working on the blog. And it’s on the byline. Anyway.

I thought I’d give a quick update about where things are at the moment, as well as talk about plans for the future. Don’t worry, no major changes to the structure or the type of content I’m releasing. Not this time, at least. Just last week we had a historic heatwave here in the Netherlands, with temperatures reaching nearly record highs, only beaten by the 2019 heatwave by a few tenths of a degree. I am not used to those temperatures and just had to do my best to stay cool, so I apologise for the lack of uploads during that time.

It did, however, inspire me to begin writing a feature about heatwaves. I’m doing what I can to be as thorough as possible, so hopefully you’ll be able to see it before the end of July. There’s been a lot of heatwave news around the world this year, and we’ve only just started summer here in the Northern Hemisphere. If you’d like a small rant about how heatwaves are covered, that’s contained in small menu right below this paragraph. I don’t want it taking over the purpose of this post, after all.

Heatwave rant here

Heatwaves are deadly. Not in the metaphorical sense, in the very literal sense of thousands of excess deaths due to issues caused by the heat. I often see things along the lines of, ‘Warm Temperatures Inspire Hundreds to Visit the Shore,’ and I hope the issue is obvious here. This is a genuine natural disaster that is being treated as though it’s just an excuse to enjoy a nice warm day, maybe take off of work or school. I want you to imagine an EF4 tornado that has torn through a small town, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses and killing dozens, and then imagine the headline of most major publications saying, “Wow! Rare Cloud and Wind Formation Leaves Town in Awe!”

Even in this most recent heatwave, I was scrolling through YouTube when I got this video recommended to me. The news organisation for the Dutch province of North Brabant, Omroep Brabant, had posted this.

Translated, it reads, “Not everyone finds the heat annoying! | #news” and I couldn’t help but think about how that’s not the point. Sure, I find it annoying, but beyond that it’s taking a very dangerous weather event and making light of it. There will be much more about this in the feature, I just felt it was worth a few paragraphs here.

As for the future, I have been working on two massive videos for the Snippets of Science YouTube channel. These are still rather far in preproduction, with one of them needing quite a bit of equipment that I don’t yet have and, I’ll be honest, physical endurance that I severely lack and have been training for the last couple of months. Going from field work in marine biology to desk work in science communication has done wonders for my mental health and now I only need to get my physical health back up there.

If you’ve been enjoying what I’ve been writing and you can afford it, I kindly ask for you to support me through Ko-Fi. I want to keep my science communication free for everyone, and the only way to do that is either advertise to you or ask for your assistance. If you’re unable to give anything, please share this blog around to people who you think would like a source of science news outside of major clickbait publications. I too am exhausted by the state of science journalism and even see it on my end while reading press releases that try to oversell the article they are covering. I will never use my articles or their titles to knowingly misrepresent the research as I understand it, and will issue corrections should these mistakes be found.

And one final note that is just a little cherry on top, a fun experience I’ve had. I made reference to this in the social media posts about my most recent article about the earthquakes under Wyoming, but genuinely the most enjoyable part of this job is being confused by something I see in an article, emailing the lead researcher, and getting an expert opinion or statement in only a few hours. For that article in particular, I was looking into whether those earthquakes were related to the supervolcano nearby, and was unable to find any reference to them in the same paper, so I asked Dr. Koper what he thought, and later that day he replied and said there was no relation between the earthquakes and the supervolcano, but let me know about how the opposite was true. I thought I had asked a silly question, just something to put your minds at ease about this discovery, and then found out something new about our world.

If you want to know more, ask questions. People love to talk about the things they know and want to share their excitement with you. If you find an expert, there are no dumb questions, they will be just as happy to share the basics of their field as they are to share a groundbreaking discovery.