The Best Australian Science Writing 2022

By NewSouth

What can a microbial gravesite on a moon teach us? Why are scientists risking their lives to safeguard a seed bank? How does a virus detective story show us why we need to be vigilant about the next disease outbreak? Great science writing compels us to pay attention to parts of the world often unseen, from a dusty gold mine which could help answer one of the biggest questions in astrophysics to a delightful date with the misunderstood blobfish. This acclaimed anthology— now in its twelfth year— selects the most riveting, entertaining, poignant, and fascinating science stories and essays from Australian writers, poets, and scientists. With a foreword by health broadcaster and commentator Dr. Norman Swan, this collection covers another remarkable year, not only filled with seismic moments in science, but also shining a light on important work that would otherwise be overlooked.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781742238586

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS

Ivy Shih

One of my most treasured possessions is a fossil ammonite, which has pride of place on my desk. The person who gifted it said they hoped it would bring me comfort and ground me when everything seemed insurmountable. After all, ‘There’s nothing quite like looking at a 110-million-year-old fossil to put problems into perspective’.

That was invaluable advice for someone who not long ago had spent most of her days at a microscope, searching grid by grid among a sea of cells for an elusive tiny green dot. My quest was to find one of the smallest things in the world – a virus. The feeling of scientific endeavour and discovery filled me with a euphoria that is unmatched. That was my world – reduced to a pale green dot.

However, it is hard to deny how another virus, 140 nanometres in size, has become a monolith in our lives, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic which has rearranged even how we communicate. Words and phrases such as ‘social distancing’, ‘epidemiology’, ‘herd immunity’ and ‘modelling’, once confined to textbooks and scientific conferences, have entered our everyday vocabulary.

The research community has never had a more captive global audience. There is a hunger to make sense of the pandemic, but the language of science can seem disorientating and alienating. The past year has emphasised the value of clear communication. We have seen the influence of the former on public health. Bad communication causes confusion; good communication creates confidence.

Science journalists and writers have always been on the frontline, documenting the progression of knowledge and research – flaws and all.

Scientific progress does not occur overnight. Each new discovery is an inch towards a greater body of knowledge that will one day complete a picture. That small detail can seem inconsequential and be dismissed by the public. To document this is a responsibility not taken lightly by good science writers. They strive to report with clarity and integrity on the complexities of science, taking impenetrable scientific language and distil it into clear prose. Great science writing can also captivate us, compelling us to pause and pay attention to the subject being covered.

Science writing is a skill that should never be taken for granted by the public and policy makers.

The year 2021, which is chronicled by most of this year’s edition of The Best Australian Science Writing, would be remembered by many as one that was time-stamped by monumental milestones regarding how we reckoned with the pandemic – disorientating and distressing in equal measure. As soon as there was a new measure to manage the pandemic, a new turning point emerged to counter it. This included lockdowns, the Delta and Omicron COVID variants of concern, and the development of the suite of COVID-19 vaccines.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was given front row seats to witness something remarkable – the scientific process magnified. A new discovery would be overturned or gain a new level of complexity in just a few weeks. As you read this book, no doubt our understanding of the virus behind COVID-19 has changed again. Good, balanced science writing has helped us navigate the flood of information.

The research featured in the COVID-19–related pieces was all current at the time of publication and should serve as a record. However, the pandemic has already left an indelible mark everywhere, and you will find COVID an intrinsic part of many articles.

In the long wake of the pandemic, it is easy to lose sight of everything else. The authors of the pieces in the 2022 Best Australian Science Writing remind us all that a virus does not slow down time or research, nor the impact of human-wrought actions on our environment.

Another milestone in 2021 was the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report stating that average temperatures are 1.4 degrees Celsius hotter than early last century, due to human influence. A UN emissions gap report states that the world is on track to hit 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.

Humanity’s next steps, Nick Kilvert writes, will be recorded by ‘Earth’s black box’, a giant indestructible steel box on Tasmania’s west coast. Not unlike an aeroplane’s black box, Earth’s black box will be storing climate data. If our civilisation falls, the hope is another will learn from our inactions. Climate data isn’t the only thing being stored. Lydia Hales looks into biobanking – cryopreserving animal samples to preserve the delicate hope that it could save an endangered species. Helen Sullivan documents the dedication of scientists in safeguarding a seed bank in Syria, at great risk to their lives. Those seeds embody not only the fragility of science at the mercy of society, but perhaps our salvation. But in some cases, our efforts to stem the inevitable are too late, Zoe Kean writes; some endangered species cling on, but their cultural knowledge is lost. John Pickrell, editor of the 2018 Best Australian Science Writing anthology, tackles a seemingly familiar topic with fresh eyes – how scientists are investigating innovative ways to control feral cat populations in the Australian outback. It seems researchers are investigating ways to undo or slow down the consequences of our actions – or at least remind us what we have lost.

The future is uncertain, but Amanda Anastasi gives us a simple but elegant poem predicting the outcome of Australia’s lethargy towards action as media headlines.

But we should not ignore the past – which is too easily forgotten – and Jane McCredie exposes the origins of immunisation, which go back further than you might expect. The rings of the mighty kauri tree illuminate our ancient past, and are one of the best time capsules of our Earth’s past climate, Kate Evans writes. However, the kauri tree is highly sought after not just by scientists, but by ‘swamp cowboys’ who harvest the trees for timber.

One reality of 2021 is that COVID-19 dominated the headlines. We saw how the global scientific community threw their collective expertise into understanding this new virus, while exposing the flaws of the research process and feeding into the confusion with real-life consequences. Dyani Lewis, editor of the 2021 Best Australian Science Writing anthology, in a landmark piece of science journalism, investigates the scientific shift in understanding that the virus is more likely to spread through the air than via surfaces. It seems like common sense now, but it was a genuine point of contention in the past. Like everyone else, the scientific community scrambled to understand SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19. Clare Watson brings us a story of how, due to the breakneck pace of research and a lack of rigour in experiments, pre-prints (usually a source of open information sharing in academia) in some cases became a source of misinformation. Olivia Willis forces us to set COVID-19 aside for a moment by sharing the origins of the Hendra virus. This article will grip you from the first sentence, and is not only a virus detective story, but also a tale of how an intricate network of scientists and vets acting as frontline ‘sentinels’ can help us be vigilant about the next disease outbreak.

Often we place too much emphasis on how research can be applied to our lives, but in doing so we do a disservice to the discipline itself, overlooking the core of what makes research so alluring and eclipsing the people behind it. The pursuit of knowledge, uncovering a new piece of understanding of the world, is ultimately a human endeavour. For what other purpose do scientists choose to do what they do? Nothing captures this better than Tabitha Carvan’s profile of mathematician Professor Amnon Neeman, who wants no fanfare despite solving two problems that have stumped his peers for 20 years. When asked why, Professor Neeman’s answer will no doubt echo that of many other researchers. ‘Because – I want to know the answer.’

Canowindra in the NSW central west is the home of some of the best-preserved specimens of Devonian fish in the world. Drew Rooke tells the story of Dr Alex Ritchie, who spent years preserving the site in a dusty corner of Australia. Robyn Arianrhod revives the scientific legacy of Thomas Harriot, whose mathematical work on gravity and the law of refraction was hidden in 8000 pages of scientific research.

There is delight to be found in every corner of the world to restore your sense of wonder. Angus Dalton invites us to be the third wheel on his date with the misunderstood ‘blobfish’, and gives it a facelift. Louise Wakeling’s poem beautifully distils the eel’s migration from pond to sea, under filtered moonlight. Angela Heathcote shows some superheroes don’t wear capes, but may rather be an industrial designer wielding a wombat dental gag, designing tools for veterinary surgeons. Elizabeth Finkel presents our quest to unravel the mystery of our missing ancestor through the entertaining lens of a crime scene investigation piece. Alice Gorman writes a contemplative piece on the first space chimp. Lauren Fuge’s immersive piece explores our understanding of geologic time.

What is the next frontier of knowledge? Alicia Sometimes’s poem on the stunning image of the black hole has a mesmerising quality to it. We are drawn to its rhythm and lull, not unlike the pull of the poem’s subject matter. Jackson Ryan chronicles a mission to uncover a microbe gravesite on Phobos. From the dark reaches of space to the darkness 1000 metres underground, Jacinta Bowler describes how a dusty gold mine could play a part in answering one of the biggest questions in astrophysics – what is dark matter made from? Kate Crawford goes into a deep dive into artificial intelligence research and its problematic roots and attempt to quantify human emotion. Bianca Nogrady, the editor of the 2015 and 2019 editions of this anthology, attempts to answer a chemical question – hormones, and the complex history women have with them. Kate Cole-Adams explores the emerging role of psychedelics in medicine and its dual nature – does it have potential, or is it problematic? However, Michelle Starr’s article reminds us that sometimes discovering ‘nothing’ in science is also important. There is, in fact, much that we can learn from nothing.

Science is often a way of trying to reckon with something indecipherable. One element often missing in science writing is humanity. Suzannah Lyon’s deeply personal exploration of traumatic brain injury and our fractured understanding of it, woven through a tribute to her late father, made me weep openly in a public library. Christine Kenneally’s piece leads us deftly through the emotional and physical impacts an ambitious clinical trial of brain implants had on its participants.

The best part of science, with all its complexities and flaws, is its ability to sustain an infinite curiosity about the world around you.

It’s the little things, when placed in the frame of the biggest picture – not unlike a great science article – that have the potential to create the biggest change in how you view your surroundings. The greatest potential of science writing lies in its ability to bring into sharp focus a topic that previously seemed distant.

In the right hands an excellent science article has the ability to make us pay attention to details we could otherwise overlook. It makes you feel a multitude of emotions, ask questions and lights up your mind. There is always a story buried in the little things – a complex equation, a pale green dot that is a virus particle, the boundary of a tree ring. But remember that it is seeing how they fit into the greater scheme of things that makes those details truly shine. You’ll then find wonder everywhere you go, and in everything you experience – as in Kelly Wong’s article, even in what makes a good slice of sourdough bread.

THE HUNT FOR ALIEN LIFE ON PHOBOS, ONE OF MARS’S MYSTIFYING MOONS

Jackson Ryan

Imagine yourself standing at the edge of a hot spring. Wisps of steam emanate from the ground, rolling across the water’s edge in waves. A gentle breeze blows across your face – pleasant, if not for the noxious smell of rotten eggs, mixed with the scent of a struck match. The centre of the spring boils, bubbling away slowly; from above, it looks like a deep blue hole in the world.

Within the warm waters that trail away from the spring, microbes jostle for position. Some have mastered the art of photosynthesis, converting sunlight into energy to survive. Others feed on the rich soup of chemicals provided by the spring. These mats of microorganisms produce carotenoids, the same chemicals that give pumpkins and carrots their typical hues, so the edges of the spring burst with vibrant oranges and yellows.

It’s a scene visitors to Yellowstone National Park may have witnessed, but this isn’t a scene from Earth.

This is Mars, billions of years ago.

In its earliest days, places like Mars’s Gusev crater, formed by a gigantic asteroid impact around 4 billion years ago, were likely home to hot springs. On Earth, hot springs are lively places. Not just because of the throngs of tourists fumbling with iPhones to snap photos, but because their waters are brimming with bacteria, fungi and viruses.

It follows that in similar locations on Mars where water was once present, life may have found a way to thrive in the muck.

Gusev crater is, today, a hollowed-out desert carved into the face of the red planet. Over billions of years, Mars’s atmosphere slowly disappeared. Its landscape morphed, its waters dried up. Volcanic activity resurfaced areas of the planet, including Gusev, eradicating any life that may have been present (and that’s a big may).

But if there were microbial communities present in those temperate waters, they may still linger in the rock left behind. The chemical mix of a hot spring, rich in the mineral silica, is the perfect preservation material. As the spring dried, the silica would have entombed the still-living microscopic beasts within, frozen like Han Solo in carbonite, burying them underneath Mars’s hostile surface.

There may be a vast cemetery of tiny organisms buried beneath the red planet’s exterior.

Uncovering the gravesites has long been the holy grail for astrobiologists and a chief science goal of NASA’s Mars exploration program. The agency has sent five rovers to the surface of the planet since 1997. Today, its most advanced rover, Perseverance, rolls along the base of a dried-out lake bed known as Jezero, drilling into rocks and collecting samples that may be returned to Earth in the 2030s.

But another space agency, about one-tenth the size of NASA, is thinking outside of the planet-sized box in its search for Martian life. With its Martian Moons Exploration mission, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, later this decade will touch down on a world no spacecraft has visited before: Phobos, one of Mars’s mystifying moons.

Scientists at JAXA, and other astronomers, hypothesise that on this curious moon they may find signs of ancient microbes that were catapulted off the surface of Mars and flung across the cosmos. The remains of these unwitting spacefaring organisms have been untouched for millions of years and, soon, could be plucked from Phobos’s face and returned to Earth.

An asteroid sneeze

When an asteroid collides with a planet, the planet unleashes a mighty sneeze of dust and rock. The faster the asteroid smashes into the surface, the bigger the sneeze.

Much of the planetary snot will fall back to the surface, but if the asteroid impact is powerful enough, the sneeze will fling dust and rock into space.

Some of it can even arc across the gap between Mars and Earth, traveling tens or hundreds of millions of miles between the two planets. If the debris survives its plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, it smacks into the ground as a meteorite. Over 300 meteorites discovered on Earth originated from the planet next door.

Just like a human sneeze contains microbes, the material ejected by a planet may also contain microscopic life – or the remnants of it. If the asteroid death blast doesn’t melt the rock and the microbes to mere atoms, there’s a chance they can float into the cosmos.

Unfortunately for would-be Martian hunters, no microbes lurk within the stuff that makes it to Earth. ‘Martian meteorites don’t have any signatures of Martian life,’ says Tomohiro Usui, a planetary scientist at JAXA. The atmosphere mostly takes care of that and alters the rock as it burns through the air.

But Mars is scarred by impacts from drifter asteroids that slammed into the surface over the planet’s life. If these impacts were to hit in just the right spot, at just the right angle and just the right time, there’s a chance the ejected material would make it to Phobos, Mars’s curious, potato-shaped moon.

Phobos has the closest orbit of any known moon to its parent body, circling the red planet at a distance of just 6000 kilometres (3700 miles), about the same as the distance between Tokyo and Honolulu. For comparison, Earth’s moon resides at a distance of around 385 000 kilometres (240 000 miles). Phobos is practically hugging Mars and moves around the planet so quickly that if you were to observe it from the surface, you’d be able to see it rise and set twice every Martian day.

Its proximity to the red planet has led JAXA scientists and engineers to speculate about the potential for finding the remnants of Martian microbes on the moon’s surface.

‘If Martian life once existed and was widespread elsewhere on Mars, the chance that its dead remains exist also on Phobos is, in my opinion, relatively high,’ says Ryuki Hyodo, a planetary scientist at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.

When Hyodo speaks of ‘dead remains’, he is referring to a series of biosignatures the JAXA team has dubbed ‘shigai’, for ‘sterilised and harshly irradiated genes, and ancient imprints’. ‘Dead remains’ is the English translation for shigai, and the term was coined in an August 2021 article published in the journal Science.

It’s possible, JAXA believes, that Phobos could be a satellite cemetery, unwittingly holding molecular evidence of long-dead microorganisms. Mars’s second moon, Deimos, may also contain pieces of Mars on its surface, but it orbits at a much greater distance and is about half the size of Phobos. Why go to the moons instead of Mars itself? Simply put, it’s easier. Haruna Saguhara, an analytical chemist at JAXA, explains that the molecular evidence present on Phobos’s surface could be anything from bacteria-like features stamped in rock or the chemical signatures of ancient microbes – fats, DNA and carbon compounds indicative of life.

Hyodo notes that any impact that kicked up Martian soil wouldn’t need to reach high velocities to land on Phobos because the moon is within Mars’s gravitational sphere. ‘This is why potential biosignatures could be delivered to Phobos without being destroyed by an impact process,’ he says. That makes searching for shigai on Phobos a viable option.

‘I buy that argument,’ says Steven Ruff, a planetary geologist at Arizona State University and creator of the Mars Guy YouTube channel, ‘but it will be a challenge.’

Columbia, silica

To understand how likely JAXA’s Mars-shot is at finding remnants of Martian life on Phobos, it’s important to understand why scientists believe Mars itself may have been habitable in its ancient past.

Columbia Hills is the perfect place to start. Located in the centre of Gusev Crater, these hills were explored by NASA’s rolling Mars laboratory Spirit in 2005. Ruff and other scientists hypothesise that Columbia Hills was once home to ancient hot springs.

Spirit was equipped with a spectrometer, which can determine the chemical composition of rocks, and the rover snapped hundreds of photos of an area known as the Home Plate. It showed that this region contained fields of opaline silica, which, on Earth, form in hydrothermal systems like hot springs.

The nodular deposits are associated with preservation of microbial life in places like El Tatio, Chile, a hot spring that provides some of the most Mars-like conditions we know of.

‘The story of what Spirit found in the Columbia Hills of Gusev Crater is quite provocative with regard to potential evidence for life billions of years ago,’ says Ruff, emphasising what Spirit found isn’t proof of life but reason to explore further.

There is still debate over the existence of a hydrothermal system at Columbia Hills and what might have caused the opaline silica deposits. Confirmation, Ruff says, would require a sample-return mission. Without one, scientists are left to pore over the data from Spirit and other Martian robots to try to pull apart the story of Columbia Hills.

There are some small mercies, though. Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics, which have reshaped the surface of Earth over eons, deforming the rocks and obscuring fossils and biosignatures of ancient life forms on our planet.

The hunt for alien life on Phobos, one of Mars’s mystifying moons ‘The preservation potential of those hot spring deposits in very ancient rocks on Mars is much better than what we see on Earth,’ says Tara Djokic, a geologist at the Australian Museum.

Djokic and her colleagues have studied ancient hot springs in the Pilbara, Western Australia, and found evidence of 3.5-billion-year-old cyanobacteria, a type of photosynthesising microbe. If similar life arose on Mars in the same timespan as it did on Earth, it stands to reason it could be locked away within the soil of Columbia Hills.

And if any of these rich, potentially habitable areas on Mars were bombarded by asteroids, perhaps the ejected mess could have made it to Phobos. If any agency is capable of finding out, it’s JAXA.

Double prizes

Retrieving samples from small cosmic bodies, millions of miles from Earth, is a JAXA specialty.

In 2013, it launched the Hayabusa2 spacecraft to a 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid known as Ryugu. The ancient rock provided a treasure trove of intriguing samples for JAXA to collect, and Hayabusa2 was able to make two swift retrievals. In December 2020, it returned the rocks to Earth by slinging a sample capsule towards a landing spot in outback Australia. It was the second time JAXA had been able to retrieve samples from an asteroid and bring them home.

Masaki Fujimoto, the deputy director of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, says people might be expecting JAXA to do something similar to the Hayabusa2 mission – and to a degree, it is. Though a tantalising prospect, the chief goal of the Martian Moons Exploration, or MMX, program isn’t to track down signs of past Martian life. Rather, the spacecraft is built to snatch samples from the moon’s surface in an attempt to tease apart the competing hypotheses of Phobos’s origin.

Scientists have proposed two different theories for the moon’s formation. The first posits that Phobos was an asteroid belt object that got knocked a little too close to Mars and was captured by the red planet’s gravity. Its orbit, which aligns a little too neatly with Mars’s equator, seems to rule this out. The second suggests that Phobos was created after a dwarf planet, about 14 times smaller than Pluto, careened into Mars, launching rock into orbit that eventually coalesced to form the moon.

However, what awaits MMX when it arrives in orbit around Phobos remains unknown. Usui notes that scientists are still unsure ‘about the conditions at the surface’ and what kind of rocks might litter Phobos’s face. That’s a problem JAXA encountered – and overcame – at Ryugu. For MMX, the team has had to adapt its sample retrieval methods a little.

MMX will touch down on Phobos multiple times to collect samples, like Hayabusa2 did. But because of the unknown conditions at the surface, it will be equipped with two separate collection