Understanding how everything is connected (and what to steer clear of)
The best Australian science writing of 2024 is between the covers of a book that will fascinate and occasionally befuddle.
An Australian MP, whose identity has been lost in the mists of time, once stood up in Parliament and announced, “Everything’s connected”, then sat down again. How right he was is demonstrated repeatedly in this annual exhibition of our best science writers and their work.
Cancer, AI, climate change, long COVID, coffee and cave art might seem ill-fitting pieces in the global jigsaw of our lives, but after browsing through this compendium of essays they will seem less random than you imagine.
We’re reminded that when economics and the value put on life itself collide, the latter often comes off second best: “According to Michael Good, a vaccine researcher at Griffith University, no one is interested, commercially, in making a vaccine to prevent rheumatic heart disease because it mostly affects lower-income countries, which are not the most profitable markets.”
A wrenching tale of the battle to combat child cancer, The Heroes of Zero – by Walkley-winning journalist Cameron Stewart – has recently been awarded the “Logie” of Australian science writing.
In his poignant account, light penetrates the darker corners of our existence as the parents of a girl named Amity, who died from a brain tumour, choose to donate the fatal tissue to an institute founded by Sydney pediatrician Michelle Haber.
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Two of the best essays concern AI – its connection with consciousness and assessing how realistic is the fear it might turn on its creators. We encounter the chilling term (p)doom, the risk calculation that it will generate an extinction event for humankind. I won’t remove an incentive to read these for yourself by revealing the percentage, but here’s a clue – it’s not negligible.
Those of you who are considered specialists in certain fields might well pick up some info-nugget here that gives your team an edge at the next pub trivia quiz night.
If you ask me where the oldest rock art in the world is, I might say, “somewhere in the Kimberley” while pausing for the quizmaster to give France’s Lascaux Caves as the correct answer. Turns out it’s in neither location but an hour and a half’s drive north of Makassar, in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where a cave painting at least 44,000 years old has been discovered in the karst. The oldest storytelling artwork anywhere, so author Dyani Lewis tells us, is flaking away, and the race is on to save it.
Deep between these covers lie rare facts: Who knew that Australia is where the first songbirds evolved? And there are epiphanies. One writer, furious that Homo sapiens of all species tag some other species “wild animals”, puts us in our place with: “The animals aren’t visiting us in our homes … We live in theirs.”
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Drew Rooke’s Predicting the Future is arcane, but in a good way. Its topic might sound dry – a history of climate modelling from 1896 to the present day – but the way he tells his tale, it’s anything but.
Sipping on the laws of coffee
If all this sounds too academic for your taste, take a break and sip Bianca Nogrady’s offering on the science of coffee. Even in over-caffeinated Melbourne the odd, knowing reference to the Maillard reaction and Darcy’s Law are bound to boost your street cred.
Few errors have made it past the editors, the biggest of them being the assertion that Norway has joined the European Union. The Norwegians narrowly defeated two referendums on membership – one in 1972, the second in 1994.
Everything’s wrapped up with an eye-catching epilogue – development of a new range of emojis for the Kaytetye (pronounced Catch-eye) people of the central desert lands – cueing what might just end up being word of the year for 2025: Indigemoji.
So, everything is connected, by the common link of human curiosity – a desire, so powerful one might as well call it a need to know. To know more about the world and the times we live in. Read this book and you will.
The Best Australian Science Writing 2024, edited by Jackson Ryan and Carl Smith, NewSouth (UNSW Press), $32.99.