welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm laura and in this episode i'm joined by pretty much the entire team there's quite a lot of us and we're here to talk about what's so difficult about communicating science so to get to know everyone a bit and understand the motivation for being here we're going to do this first segment as a bit of a rapid fire round
so each of us can sum up from our experiences of science communication or why we're passionate about this particular skill in just a few sentences and possibly not some role of your words as much as i am uh so no pressure to the team uh but ruaida let's start with you science communication is a a difficult thing to to make basically so from my own experience as a lecturer it's depend on your audience if you're talking to a first year undergrad it would be different if
you're talking to a fourth year undergrad um and it's all about like having like the the connection uh within the class and you'll have like within the same cohort you'll have different sort of um students you'll have very bright student not as bright students so you always try to stay in the middle with your like trying to keep everyone in and get the conversation going in teachings yeah that makes sense i know from my own experience of attempting to teach the
pace is quite important and you can never get it exactly right galia what about you what's your experience i think mine is a little different to rueda actually because she's talking to people who kind of all are all are interested in the same kind of area whilst my experience so i concentrate on looking at water resource planning and water resource management um and so it requires a lot of people to come together technical and non-technical and
as soon as you say something like science or technical it sends fear waves everywhere and everyone's like shivering like no no i'm not technical or i won't understand anything or something like that and i think historically we've not been very good at communicating technical work to non-technical people and hence there's this fear and because of this i think that now we kind of shy away from discussing some of the more meatier parts of science and the technical
parts and and we end up looking at things a bit too binary bit too black and white like the science as good or bad and it's there's there's less of a conversation i feel because of this ah i like your comment about meaty science i feel like it's a joking person i'm sure someone will find that joke throughout this podcast i just thought it was funny meaty science we can move on i don't know what about you what would you like to share about your experience or passion
about science communication i'm from a nuclear background i'm a nuclear safety engineer so and i'm quite passionate about stem events and sort of communicating with the wider public um whatever age that may be whether that's industry or whether that's university students or whether that's just secondary students who are just interested in what to do um and i find that there is a big there's this big sort of uh fear factor around nuclear specifically um that oh
it's very um it's very complicated it's very scary the consequences are dire you know it's um there's a whole thing around it and then when you get things like chernobyl the the the show or you know those kind of things which are coming out i suppose they just don't really help um but actually i find that once you start talking to people um they're quite open to it they're quite receptive to it they just i feel like because we're talking about science communication we just
don't communicate it well um i know that things have changed recently over over time and people are making a huge amount of effort to sort of get get the knowledge out there so that people aren't afraid of this um but i think there's a lot of work still to be done about it once you start talking to people i my experience has been i know that galia said that people are sort of like oh science nope don't know anything i'm going to turn away um but i actually find perhaps because it's
such a sort of fear factor or maybe it's just a different audience i don't i don't really know how it goes but um i found that once you start talking to people they're actually quite open about it and they actually ask really intelligent questions so you can tell that they're following what you're talking about they're not just sort of like doing filler questions just to sort of i don't know be nice to me or something um so yeah i i feel quite passionate about
getting out there explaining things um and just basically increasing people's knowledge that it's it's not this big huge you know thing that we all need to be scared of yeah and i think that's partly why we're all here to increase people's knowledge and our own knowledge um yeah and i agree it's kind of like that fear of the unknown isn't it because nuclear technology is you don't often get to see it do you so if you don't know what it is yeah it's quite natural to like be
slightly wary of it i think ellie what about your experience and your passion for this subject um so i'm a zoologist and i've also got a master's in wildlife documentary production so i think my experience with cycom is more how can you marry sort of science facts and information and processes with telling an entertaining story and presenting that to a general public and we're sort of very lucky that we can film animals and it's all beautiful and you know if you
watch a david attenborough documentary you know people are sucked in by you know a whale leaping out of the ocean but how do we marry that with this is actually very serious or there's a problem or we want someone to do something like a lot of documentaries nowadays fortunately are a call to action or a call to arms so we're using the science and we're using the picture and the story to influence people's lives whether we want them to change what they eat or what they
buy or what they wear and i think it's so important to do that in a responsible way and in a nuanced way that sort of takes account of the wider population and you know the world as a whole but also the specific organ audience that you're targeting at the time as well yeah that the the ability to tell stories um whether it's with video of animals or data and graphs if you prefer that sort of thing it's less fluffy but more interesting for some of us
um yeah it's a really difficult skill but it has a lot of meaning doesn't it um i think some of the things that stuck in my mind a lot have been because there's been a story behind it and i can see how it relates to my life and what i'm doing um so yeah very good points uh antonia your turn so um from my perspective i've kind of worked with um in research looking at really big top-level picture of what would happen to the uk if if you know we did go renewables and once you've
kind of done that analysis what do you do with it you kind of it's supposed to inform people or talk to businesses say you know i'm looking at your energy trends you know maybe you want to if you want to reduce your calm footprint this how you do it but then you know you're talking to people who are like financially motivated so how do you sort of bring the the technical part in without sort of making them fearful making them worry about finances and sort of communicate
the the need to do it without making them feel forced you know it's a lot of it's a lot of like almost like trying to market the positive impact to them so that they can market themselves in um in a positive way but also actually do something positive um for the planet so my science communication kind of is is a bit more policy making um experience um you know to decision makers and getting them like telling a story but with graphs
and data and making sure it's not too dumbed down like you know people sometimes people just want a quick answer like galia says you know just black and white tell me do i go for it or not and trying to give them the the crunchy bits but without being too too wiped over to to blanket yes this is good and no this is bad that kind of thing so yeah difficult balance crunchy and meaty uh we have to develop some sort of food analogy as we go through this what's crunchy and meaty bacon
crisp sandwich what kind of crispy meaty flavor crisps with fluffy sandwiches yeah oh eddie you're the last person to i can pick on as a victim here what's your take on this um i think very similar to everyone else so i'm from a fusion background and i've had to i've often been asked in different roles um where i've been in before to communicate um stuff about fusion and sometimes that's like for making videos and um with journalists and media and
stuff so like one of my old places i'm not going to name any names but they'd have like a media day where people would come to try and find out about the the project and the work that's going on and different there's a huge difference in what different media outlets want from people as well which i found quite interesting so i remember once i was getting interviewed and they kind of they ask you questions but they also just tell you what to say in response to the questions
the people asking you them and i remember this instance they were like so you know i've heard pineapples amount of hydrogen is equivalent to like 10 000 tons of coal or something like that and i was just like i have no idea if that's if that's true um and it's like what can you just say that then or you know something like along these lines and i was just like i don't know but um yeah so i think i did end up saying it in the end because it was cleared by the comms people but
afterwards in hindsight i was like why did i say that i don't know if that's true i don't know where they've got this data from and they like as people like okay again food related metaphors but they come up with these like analogies metaphors which i understand the useful nature of them in terms of putting things in context which i think is necessary for people who aren't experts but sometimes it does come at like oversimplifying a quite nuanced and uncomplicated issue which i
think can be problematic and also it's quite lazy journalism in a way in that they rely on the comms departments of scientific projects or research groups and things like that which yeah it's great for those researchers and that's the the you know the message that they want to get out there but i think as a scientific journalist for example it should be your job to really investigate everything about what your you're you know looking at rather than kind of having a preconceived
idea and trying to just show that show that to people i don't know if that made sense but again yeah it all comes down to like creative storytelling i guess uh in a way and whether that comes at the expense of of the the technical nuance and detail that might be important to the scientists it's hard to get that balance isn't it to to make it relatable for people like the pineapple and um trying to sort of not dumb it down too much as well and getting it technical
because i often use a nuclear reactor i i often describe it as a giant kettle um and and that actually works brilliant for people to understand how it's essentially just heating up you get the steam and then you're using the seam to turn the turbines and et cetera et cetera but then if you dumb it down too much then it's it's almost as if you're not doing it just as to what you're talking about so it's about finding the right balance isn't that absolutely and i think as
scientists we're not really trained or um not very good really at communicating what we're doing and that's why other people come up with these kind of stories because i guess it's more attractive to the general audience and things like that but i think a lot of scientists do struggle or don't have the skills to communicate their research effectively or well because let's face it not a lot of people listen to scientists do they that's uh we're not as exciting as actors or footballers
or you know any of those other professions i think you're doing yourself a disservice i think you're one of those people anika oh thank you very much we all are yeah i mean i did a bit of training um throughout my career on science communication i think one of the things that i was sort of told was it's not necessarily dumbing it's down but it's about maybe simplifying the story or talking to an intelligent non-expert and having that conversation with them and like
thinking about a way to try and get those nuances across that i think a few people have touched on um i think from my own perspective like going way back to when i was in school like i found science pretty easy especially when there was a teacher that explained something in a way that had meaning to me for example the classical mechanics that you do in physics i could i could instantly see how
that helped me make sense of the world because it was looking at how you would uh throw projectiles across a particular distance or how you would um figure out like the rolling resistance of tires on various different surfaces and gradients so i found that really meaningful but contrast that with my phd where um i was mostly either confused or frustrated by all this nuanced information that wasn't necessarily communicated all that well to someone that was trying to get into that field
um it honestly felt like that sort of nuanced um detail was just for the privileged view and it seemed to me that there has to be a better way of doing science under communicating it because i think you're right a lot of scientists don't really take the time to sit down and understand how they could communicate their particular fields they're so used to talking to people that already understand it um so i mean that's me that's why i got involved in this podcast
which i'm actually really enjoying being part of um so now we've set the scene by talking about our experience of science communication and why we care about it i think we should dig a little deeper and talk about some science topics that we think are difficult to communicate to a non-expert so galia i think you've got quite some interesting things to say from your particular fields i guess i'm going to keep with the food and beverage theme then um so and one one particular area that comes
to mind is um that of bottled water and there's an idea that bottled water is safer to drink than tap water and so before i go into the kind of becomes around that i just want to clarify that in the uk tap water is definitely safe to drink okay we have a whole regulatory body called the drinking water inspector and the whole purpose is to monitor and ensure that the quality of water meets the eu drinking water directive so it's highly regulated and contrasts that
to bottled water they don't actually have the same type of regulation so no one actually monitors the water source or if they do there's no independent regulatory body ensuring that does happen or the production of water bottles or how long it takes for the water bottles to get to us or the conditions of those trip how much sunlight did those bottles experience etc what's frustrating is that we have great comms when it comes to bottled water they have great marketing campaigns that you
know guaranteed to quench your first or there's like some runner running in slow motion to like the end of the finish line and grabbing said water bottle and the happiest person alive but then our water companies and the water industry they're not very good at communicating that that drinking water the tap water is actually good quality water and it's really difficult to tell someone like hey i know you've seen loads of millions of adverts about how great these water bottles are but water
companies actually have a regulation in place to make sure that we have this good quality of water um because regulation doesn't sound that exciting to talk about right it doesn't sound like oh yeah but actually if you look at the regulatory body and what they what their report says it's not that exciting and i think we haven't done we as in like the water like uk industry haven't done enough communication in terms of talking to the public about water quality we only
really engage when there's like extreme events like floods or droughts or can you like you know don't don't use your hose pipe this summer because we're experiencing drought we're not very good at explaining actually this is our natural resource and this is this is what we do to make sure that you have good quality of water and if you have any problems or fears or concerns this is how you can get in contact with us and and sometimes that's okay sometimes people are just worried and
that's why they use bottled water sometimes it's a taste thing which can be solved and so there are lots of different ways in which we can sort it out but we're not being that proactive but the water in but the water bottle industry are i guess the only way which this this conversation is kind of happening at the moment is looking at the bottle itself so plastic being a problem and and the fact that it takes liters and liters of water just to make one one bottle of water um
or possibly even other ethical issues so there are some water companies that are quite notorious for depleting particular water sources across the world and that's kind of where the engagement happens but not really in terms of the quality of water it's more of a sustainability or an ethical discussion and like kind of the the quality of water kind of is put to the side often so i find that quite a hard one to to communicate ah yeah i know i didn't know that the drinks industry isn't
as highly regulated as um the water that comes out of our taps and i mean to be honest i've found for years i find it mad that we flush the toilet and like water the garden with perfectly safe drinking water yeah it's it's a bit strange isn't it well the thing is you can water your garden with um garden buds so that collects all your water all the rain water and then you can use that so again that's another water saving uh technique there after saying earlier like i feel really guilty
because i'm sat here with like a water bottle that i got today but but in my defense i went for a walk with my daughter and she got really thirsty and i didn't take water from the house so then i bought a water bottle so that that's my justification for this water i also like that's the thing it's not binary right there's there's benefits the water bottles there's the convenience that like when you're out and about you can get it um it's definitely not like a monster thing
but it's just when the discussions develop in terms of quality so people generally drink water bottles because drink water bottles drink water from the water bottles because it's perceived as better quality and that's where it's difficult to then communicate in terms of the quality i'll forgive you this time amina i also think there's like a conspiracy when they banned water bottles like from flights or from going through the airport you have to get rid of your water
like every time you're going through security and then you just had to buy like a really expensive bottle of water there's a personal mission of mine to take an empty non-plastic water bottle through every airport and find a tap and fill it up like there's like reddit threads of like oh the water bottle in bristol airport is behind boots or the water tap in my catwork is here do they always have a tap in every airport i don't think always but also if you go to like costa
or something and say can i can you fill this up for me often they'll do it for you if it's just water pre-covered it was much easier to ask people to like you know you know give you a water bottle and but a lot of airports do um have those taps like waterfront and if you can't find them ask someone because they usually do exist or reddit great points um antonia i feel like you mentioned marketing in your um why you care about this so is there anything around like the sustainability
of how different drinks are manufactured it's worth pointing out that sort of feeds into this idea of like science communication that could be improved yeah so i've got a an interesting workshop that i did on the carbon footprint of food and drinks and you know we we gave the public four drinks to order in best of worst um carbon footprint and um and it was interesting because you know there were kids involved as well as adults and you know ranging from if we have tea
coffee orange juice coca-cola where would where would you rank those and it was quite interesting you know from the point of like some kids didn't know where how orange juice was made and you know the calm footprint takes into account you know where did you get the raw materials how did you make the drink how do you package it transport it use it you know is there anything in the use face such as preparing coffee you know your boil hot water before you make the coffee
and then afterwards what happens to all the waste so you know this was a really interesting exercise and i wonder what do our panel think on tea coffee orange juice and coca-cola coke has always sounded like an enemy right so you always your natural thing is to be like yeah coke but actually what you what you're talking about is like kind of the raw ingredients and and how you make it and then the kind of the disposal of the waste so for me it might be teal coffee i can't
offer orange yeah it's gotta be a plant one it's gotta be worse the amount of water that goes into growing oranges and all that sort of thing that's gotta be huge and also we didn't grow any oranges in the uk that i know of so then immediately flying stuff in that's gonna add a huge amount so yeah maybe oranges or maybe tea i'd say tea i'm gonna go tea i'll go with tea as well i would say a milky coffee because you've got milk from the cows and i know milks are very
like intensive and yeah i think coffee is going to come from ages away and those barista machines look very energy intensive i don't know what goes into them but it looks like a lot of work to like grind the coffee and then steam it or whatever they they do i'll be honest it has been a few years since i did a workshop so i remember the high level result okay so here it is tea and coffee are on the opposite ends which which end is on which though well just so that i can win i hope
t has got more higher carbon footprint i'm still getting coffee yeah things got to be coffee's gotta be the highest cause tea the plants keep growing right so then you have to wait as long to like harvest the coffee beans themselves oh by considering like the whole process and stuff and to roast the coffee beans and stuff that's actually quite a lot of work whereas the tea is just dried in the sun so i'm gonna say coffee oh that's true you know i have to switch coffee
great life cycle thinking you know great thinking through the process of how it was made love that shows so coffee think it was like four kilograms per liter of coffee four kilos of co2 yes i'll have to verify this but or other people can verify and and give me a shout you know where when coke goes in this then coke is in the middle it is better than orange juice i'm assuming freshly squeezed orange juice as opposed to concentrate or squash i think that was about 3.5 or something
whereas i think tea it was like 10 times smaller than coffee is what i remembered wow it's quite a big difference we wanted to kick that coffee habit then switch to drinking tea yeah it was a really interesting exercise communicating this to people because it made them think about where did their food come from in the first place and how to actually consider the environmental impact because you know there was this big communication piece about considering your
where your food comes from in terms of distance but then you know if you just looked at like if i got locally grown tomatoes versus tomatoes say from spain or brazil that was actually a higher impact because you know the uk isn't natively the good environment for growing tomatoes so it was really interesting to see how this like communication piece from like 1990s became so prevalent that even like now three decades later people are still thinking of the air miles
wow it sounds like it takes quite a long time for that sort of message to filter down so yeah some really interesting points there about um how drinks are more widely different products just we don't really think about the full life cycle of where they come from and what their impact is ellie i get the impression that your story about some science topics that might be difficult to communicate to an expert might be quite different with your background in zoology and documentaries
yeah absolutely with documentaries wildlife in particular we have to be very careful i think we're always afraid of sort of breaking the rules of sort of broadcasting and showing the one wrong thing or misleading the audience is something that we're always sort of very wary about in wildlife especially because often you're following an animal and you know given the way the natural world is or you know we don't interfere is a big thing first but if you're following a prey species
and you're trying to show people the life cycle there's no guarantee that that specific animal is going to be alive to show all the behaviors that you want to show so we have to be very careful in that either if we name that animal all the shots are then of that specific individual or that we are showing the life cycle in as true or fashion as we possibly can and we're not misleading the audience into thinking oh my gosh you know that animal had you know three spots on
its left ear and now this animal's only got two what the heck are these people doing you know and that's sort of a very big problem that is you know persistent in the industry but also like we have guidelines so yeah you're not allowed to say oh this is little timmy and then three seconds later show an animal that's clearly not little to me or even not clearly little timmy you know there's always the eagle-eyed viewer that's gonna write in and be like i was watching that
documentary and they showed this animal and then three minutes later it was clearly a different animal so there's always people sort of trying to catch not catch you out but you know we have to be careful we have to not cross those boundaries but also we want to show a true picture we want to show what the animals are doing we want to show their behavior because we want people to know what it's like in the natural world and we want them to know the beauty of it and the
majesty and the you know the amazement and feel that in as true a way as they can so yeah it's very difficult but it's very rewarding as well i think yeah i have no idea that uh so much thought went into putting a documentary together and making sure you've got all the right footage which is really challenging because animals don't necessarily perform for the camera do they they're just out there doing their own thing yeah exactly and in secret life of the zoo that
is primarily really an entertainment show you know it's factual entertainment but it's still we're trying to entertain an audience we want them to watch it and we want them to enjoy it you know we've got to get that message across and yeah if you need a shot of an animal walking left to right you could spend three days trying to film that and it doesn't necessarily mean that the animal is going to do that so yeah there's a lot of patience yeah it's much harder than with
an actor and you can say please can you walk from that door to that door and you can do it 10 times but you might only have one shot at getting the animal doing what you want them to do ellie i guess part of what you're saying is so you want to guarantee the trust of the audience and i feel like trust is quite an important part actually that we've not really touched on i think you know you want the you want the audience to trust you so that you're telling a truthful story now
and you will do in the future i think that's quite an important theme to pick out on actually yeah so i guess you have to make sure that you sort of you're giving a truthful representation and making sure that what you show matches up with the story that you saw when you were recording it and it sounds like storytelling is quite common to a lot of the things that we're talking about and how do you tell the story that gets across that nuances um anika does that fit with your perspective on
things that are difficult to communicate about science storytelling is the main issue in any kind of communication and i think what stories we tell has a huge impact because we choose what story we tell and what kind of sticks in the public imagination so like what antonio was saying before about this study 30 years ago about air miles and things like that that was communicated well and that's the story that has stuck in the public imagination and it's kind of like now very topical
very depressing but with like covid the media has been going nuts for these blood clots recently with the covid vaccine and that's really in the public imagination and i've had so many people asking me oh anika do you think the vaccine's okay like what about all these blood clots and i'm like okay yeah there's a risk of blood clots but you're more likely to get a blood clot from covid or what about all this other medication that you might be taking what what are the side
effects of that we have risks in everything that we do and everything we consume but we still choose to do it we all eat certain foods that probably aren't the best for us or drinks and drinks that probably aren't the best for us and who knows how many years of our life they're taking off if you wanted to like measure in that way but we still do it we we make that you know decision informed decision and we do it so it's quite sad in a way that the media sensationalizes
stuff that okay yeah we should be aware of what risks are and we need to make informed decisions but focusing only on risks and not on the huge amounts of benefits that are expected from these things i think is really sad and i don't know what we can do to change that and to change public perceptions but i think it's really important anika's just touching on risk i just want to just point out that there's a massive risk that dr anika is also giving out medical advice
yeah i mean i'm not i'm not medically medically qualified people think i am um but i'm not so yeah thanks disclaimer and caveat but i think the vaccine thing is the same isn't it it's all trust i believe personally that getting the vaccine is a good thing for me you know it will help with covid it will help the population but when you see things in the media sensationalized and all big risk of blood clot is so very difficult to separate that from you know will this affect me
should i be worried about this what's the reality who do i trust now to tell me the truth and it works the other way as well so in the media we have you know the science says vaccines are good etc and then there's another part of the media that ridicule people who are a bit concerned about taking the vaccine and it kind of works both ways so people have genuine concerns and are fearful for whatever reason and we're not we're not very good at addressing those head-on it's more of a
like very polarized kind of approach to sorting out a particular issue i feel when it comes to communicating risk it is quite difficult to get across what the different scales are there as well um amino you work with uh risk and nuclear safety quite a lot what's your perspective on this or things you think are difficult to get across the storytelling is absolute key in communicating small example the fukushima accident that happened largely everyone thinks that that was a major
nuclear accident it wasn't it was a hydrogen explosion there wasn't any radiation release it was a very different matter but the way that it was portrayed in the media was so massive that germany's nuclear energy industry shut down so the consequences from these kind of things are huge and again it's people's perspectives isn't it different industries have different mortality rates it's not a nice thing to talk about or even think about but the reality is
that all of these industries have mortality rates the mortality rates for coal is huge for oil industry is huge even solar and wind even they have mortality rates right but they don't catch people's interest such that it becomes such a huge deal whereas like i said with the fukushima accident germany was like nope i'm done we're not gonna do that and the uk today is still paying for the hitback that we got because people are just like no no no i can't trust this dalia was
talking about regulation we have such stringent regulation in the nuclear industry that in some ways it's excessive because we we talk about radiation shielding and things as a individual just going about doing your own thing you're going to be exposed to background radiation on a daily basis and if you were pre-co vid world a frequent flyer again you would be exposed to so much background radiation so it's about the perspective of things and going back to the mortality rates
nuclear industry has the lowest mortality rate compared to like i said coal and oil and yet the way that the media portrays it is such that if an accident does happen it gets blown into proportion so much that it has worldwide effects whereas if something happens in the coal industry guess what the the industry doesn't shut down and these are sort of real things that we need to think about for example electric cars the new thing for you know low carbon footprint but the battery wastes
they're explosive they don't know what to do with that yet there's not enough research into that just yet it's not like nuclear waste that we know what to do with it and how to handle it we just we need to do better at talking to people and it's important to have that understanding for the people who are making the policies but also the public who this will ultimately affect so again it's like how do you get those nuances across and i know there are lots of nuclear safety experts
around the world that look into these things it's all based on science yeah and statistics it's all data which has all been researched and like the the death rates ten to the minus six per annum is something that they go off it's just sort of like a baseline it's massively low compared to other other industries i think that like reiterates the need to be very proactive in whatever industries we are that we've all mentioned today that rather than reacting to issues or scenarios or disasters
we need to proactively be informing people so that they're aware and educated so that they can make like informed decisions i feel like the public perception of nuclear is always very good in areas where there's nuclear power plants they see the benefits that is brought to the local area whereas in areas where there isn't nuclear power plants there's not that engage um so i think being proactive in whatever industry we're in is is really important
yeah and i think the regulator aspects become quite important as well i mean roeder i get the impression this comes up a lot in your field of civil engineering do you want to tell us a little bit about some of the difficult things to talk about that you'd want an expert to know about yeah well i'll have an example from my background in fire engineering so in case of fire you would think the main reason for mortality will be the fire itself however it's the smoke and it's the
toxic smoke that people would inhale will cause more death cases than the fire itself so it's one of the misconceptions people would have in case of fire is like they will be burned by the fire however if the smoke that we travel all over the building we'll have like lots of regulation on controlling like the movement of the smoke within the design and people would think they're safe if they have the smoke alarm that one of the things that you would need to always be careful about
is getting it checked and maintained and that would work for almost all the civil engineering applications so like you'll have this bridge made from steel but it's not necessarily will be safe for long term so you'll need to maintain it every now and then and to keep it safe and and to eliminate any risk yeah i get the impression that a lot of thought goes into making things safe so people can kind of go about their lives freely and don't really have to think about like
all the safety implications of like a lot of the things that we do in a lot of the places we visit and road do you think it's hard to communicate that to people do you think it's hard for them to to kind of understand that yeah you've got like a um a fire alarm but you also need to kind of maintain it is that communication quite hard you find um yeah it's difficult like to communicate is like the maintenance bit because like
if it if it sits there it's not necessarily is functional because you would need to check its batteries and sometimes the batteries would i know you start peeping um and you try to ignore it and some people have a very sensitive smoke alarm and they'll be rubbing it with something so it won't beep which is even more than just for like not having it is better than rubbing it with a plastic because you think you have it but you don't that's interesting because that's almost a science
communication we've not talked about which is science communication when we're not there we've made a fire alarm it's already in people's houses how do you keep that kind of science communication that will be with awareness so you'll need to erase the social awareness of i think that that's touching back to galia's point in the start with tap water being safe to drink you think so many adverts you've seen about smart water and mineral water from this place and you
know from the mountains it's also good i have never seen a tap water advert in my life and maybe maybe the tap water industry is missing a trick there to be fair i drink water off the mountains when i go camping but i do usually purify it first because i don't know what's further upstream and what is not all that good so i we've talked a lot about some of the things that are difficult to communicate do any of you having really good examples you'd want to share about how
the nuances and the storytelling and getting across different risks or addressing someone's fears and examples of storytelling that have been really good at addressing one of those things i think we talked about big numbers i'm a nurse said the fatality is 10 to the minus six these big numbers that we use as scientists and engineers doesn't make sense to normal person so we have to put it in perspective so i think amino comparing like nuclear fatalities to call fatalities you
know because they're a direct comparison makes good sense and so that's something that was really hammered in in in my um postgraduate studies was you know you do you do um these life cycle assessments but then how do you relate it back you know you can't just do a light cycle you can't say oh well this emits 10 tons of carbon because what does 10 tons of carbon mean so you got to scale back well ten tons of carbon from this particular process is equivalent to that
how many pineapples is it equivalent to how many pineapples that's the question that that's the question how many cups of tea yeah but in all seriousness getting that data is really difficult another thing is being more transparent with carbon offsetting for example i want the receipts how can you prove that again it comes down to trust i think it's almost important that we don't trust what people are saying that we do question it and then we do dig deeper and we do hold people
accountable if you're saying i've offset all my carbon for the last year prove it show me yeah show me the receipts i want to know how you've done it and if you've done it properly make other people do it too do you think there's an argument there like maybe not so much not trusting people but just getting people to question stuff a bit more and think a bit more critically critical thinking is the key i think yeah but also importantly having the right place to go to people
need to ask intelligent questions people need to be more engaged but they need to have a safe place where they can go and ask these questions and get good solid answers back i think it's just like having a simple message across is the way on like communicating science in a in a more like relevant way following on from what louis de and amin have said though i think there's definitely a thing about um building trust in relationships so it is a two-way communication it's a long-term kind
of relationship you're entering a relationship basically when you're when you're communicating and it's in it's a two-way process and you have to be kind of open to listen to other to other um ideas and opinions so um if there's anything we can take away from today i think communication is basically a relationship so there you go there's some relationship free relationship advice today we all need it uh um one thing that i know we've not mentioned yet but i think is really
interesting is people watch a load of science fiction they don't struggle to engage with us one of the reasons i like science and stuff is from movies especially like space movies and things like that that i watched when i was a kid the movies have got that whole storytelling arc and like people want to be entertained i guess but i really liked garlic's point about uh building those relationships and getting to know some friendly scientists so
be willing to sit down and do podcasts like this or do documentaries like ellie does and start these discussions that you can then have a chat about with your friends it sounds like we're all united in the shared understanding that communicating the nuances of science engineering is really difficult but it's important that we keep learning from each other and keep having these dialogues and find these meaningful stories to tell and i think that's why we all do
what we do to some extent to keep on learning and yeah for me that's exactly why i got into science because i really wanted to learn and i was curious about the world so i think we'll probably leave it there for now but if you're interested in carrying this conversation on as a listener we are on twitter so please get in touch with us the twitter handle is in the episode description and we'd really be interested in hearing about your questions what you want us to answer and
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