After the wonderful discovery and imaging of Ultima Thule recently (the farthest object visited by a human space craft) I noticed that the BBC decided to describe the rock as a Snowman... In fact, a quick search online shows that many media outlets were guilty of this; namely, naming space objects after stupid things. I then tried to figure out "to what end" did they decide to do this. It's long been said that in order to make science 'more appealing' journalists need to make science more 'relatable', and who doesn't relate to snowmen (so the logic goes). Teachers are also told this and it leads to all sorts of funny syllabuses and schemes that we have to teach. I wonder if this is true, useful or helpful. I'll explain why...
Science is inherently interesting! Having discussed lesson planning with many teachers, I can safely say that scientists have a much easier job of making things interesting than other fields of study (that's not to disparage other fields of learning!). And yet, there seems to be a need among mainstream media outlets to dumb-down scientific content. It's no wonder that many people are disconnected from science if mainstream media regularly feeds us space junk in the form of inanimate objects. This, of course, is not the only factor making people disenchanted with science.
But, by comparison, media outlets make no shortage of highly convoluted technical jargon when it comes to the finance or business sections of news coverage! Dr. Ben Goldacre has been vocal about this for quite some time and wrote a great column in the Guardian for a decade demystifying science for public consumption. For example, he makes the (facetious) point that media outlets tend to sort all food items in to: "causes cancer" or "does not cause cancer"! Why do they do this?!
In short, don't get put off by media outlets dumbing things down. There are many great technical science magazines and other media formats for public consumption; some of which can be found on the links page. The internet is alive with good science content, I would highly encourage you searching it out!
So, without further ado, here are some examples of inanimate objects BBC found in space...
Science is inherently interesting! Having discussed lesson planning with many teachers, I can safely say that scientists have a much easier job of making things interesting than other fields of study (that's not to disparage other fields of learning!). And yet, there seems to be a need among mainstream media outlets to dumb-down scientific content. It's no wonder that many people are disconnected from science if mainstream media regularly feeds us space junk in the form of inanimate objects. This, of course, is not the only factor making people disenchanted with science.
But, by comparison, media outlets make no shortage of highly convoluted technical jargon when it comes to the finance or business sections of news coverage! Dr. Ben Goldacre has been vocal about this for quite some time and wrote a great column in the Guardian for a decade demystifying science for public consumption. For example, he makes the (facetious) point that media outlets tend to sort all food items in to: "causes cancer" or "does not cause cancer"! Why do they do this?!
In short, don't get put off by media outlets dumbing things down. There are many great technical science magazines and other media formats for public consumption; some of which can be found on the links page. The internet is alive with good science content, I would highly encourage you searching it out!
So, without further ado, here are some examples of inanimate objects BBC found in space...
 |
 |
 |
 |
| BBC, 24 September 2018 There is huge 'monolith' on Phobos, one of Mars's moons For those of you who noticed... Monolith is a very relevant reference to the greatest science fiction film of all time: 2001 A Space Odyssey I'm actually quite amazed that there wasn't a separate article in the BBC about the levitating spoon!  Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS |  |
RSS Feed
