We’ve spilled plenty of ink about so-called science rappers on the Newscripts blog. But let’s face it, they are all pretenders to the throne. All hail GZA of the kingdom of Wu-Tang, who with the above taste of his upcoming solo project “Dark Matter” takes his rightful place at the top of the heap.

As we wrote last year, GZA’s upcoming album, “Dark Matter,” is inspired by science. On the March 27th episode of the PBS NewsHour, GZA gave Bronx Compass High School a sneak peek at some of his new material. We also heard about Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S., a project GZA’s involved with to help students in struggling school districts learn about science through rap. B.A.T.T.L.E.S. stands for Bring Attention to Transforming Teaching, Learning & Engagement in Science. You can learn more at PBS NewsHour’s GZA story.

Still think you can dethrone the master? PBS is sponsoring a science rap contest on YouTube that anyone can enter. The winner gets a personalized video shout-out from GZA, and other prizes. Entries are due May 3rd. More details at the bottom of PBS’s page.

Here’s the full TV segment for your viewing pleasure (GZA makes his entrance at 3:30).

My current job:
I’m a senior editor at Chemical & Engineering News magazine. That title is confusing, however. I really am a science writer, not an editor. My home base is the ACS building in downtown Washington DC. (I can see the White House from my office window). I write everything from 1500-word cover stories to 140 character tweets. I also work on videos and other multimedia for C&EN Online.

What I do in a standard “work day”:

I’ve made a pie chart about this for when I give career talks. For someone who makes their living writing, it’s actually not what I spend most of my time doing. I’d classify my most common activity as ‘information gathering’- calling people up, reading the literature, searching grant databases, scanning social media, etc. There is no ‘standard work day’. My week revolves around getting the magazine out, but that’s the basic skeleton around which I fit all my tasks.

What kind of schooling / training / experience helped me get there:
I could tell you how I became a science writer, but that wouldn’t be very useful information in isolation, because just about every science writer I know took a different path to get there. If you’re really interested in doing what I do, go to Ed Yong’s fantastic Not Exactly Rocket Science blog and read all the ‘how I got there’ tales from science writers there. (I’m number 108 on the list). I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that science writing jobs are TOUGH to get these days, especially if you have your heart set on working at a newspaper or newsstand magazine. If your goal is to write for a government agency, university, or institute, you may have more opportunities, though it’s not exactly the land of milk and honey there either. Finally, a lot of my science writer friends have at some point worked as freelancers. Many go back and forth between freelancing and staff gigs. If you are uncomfortable with the idea of running your own business at some point in your career, this may not be the path for you.

How chemistry informs my work:
I once had an editor that likened my chemistry Ph.D. to a language degree. That is the best way I can describe how my training helps me do my job. I’m exposed to corners of chemistry and aspects of chemists’ lives I never encountered in the lab (origin-of-life research, the vagaries of grant overhead, etc.) But at the end of the day I understand the basics of how a lab is run, and how science is done. Great science reporters know these things no matter what their academic background- but I think some chemists I talk to appreciate that I’m “in the club”.

Finally, a unique, interesting, or funny anecdote about my career:
Not long after joining C&EN, my dad got a phone call from his mom (my grandma). I hadn’t mentioned my new job to her at that point. Grandma said she’d heard from Eddie, a long-ago neighbor from the 80s, asking if I was writing about chemistry for C&EN. (He remembered meeting 6-year-old me many years ago.) My dad said, “yup, that’s her.” And then my grandma dropped the bombshell– “Eddie” is 1999 ACS President Edel Wasserman. So I can probably say I made contact with ACS at a younger age than any of C&EN’s staff.

“Mentoring is extraordinarily important to me.”–Robert Lefkowitz (photo: David Kroll)

Champagne reception at Lefkowitz lab. (photo: David Kroll)

Cake at Lefkowitz lab reception (photo: David Kroll)

Most scientists end up having two families. The first is the one they are born or adopted into. But the second, the lab family, can be every bit as important. I’ve been fortunate to connect with “lab family” members who never overlapped with me at the benchtop, but who share a sense of camaraderie because of our shared mentors. In fact, I credit one of my Sorensen lab siblings, Lucy Stark, with helping me make the “alternative career” connections that put me where I am today.

Robert J. Lefkowitz, who took home half of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has both kinds of family in spades. At a Duke press conference, colleagues extolled his talents as a teacher and mentor to hundreds of scientists, including his fellow laureate Brian Kobilka. Intrepid Terra Sig blogger, David Kroll, who had an excellent post about the chemistry Nobel on Wednesday morning, ventured to Duke to capture the celebrations with Lefkowitz’ lab family. (Thank you, David, for sharing your photos!)

And via Twitter, I learned about the reaction to the prize from a member of Lefkowitz’ outside-the-lab family: his daughter, Cheryl Renée Herbsman (née Lefkowitz), an author.

Wow, just found out my dad won the Nobel Prize in chemistry! cnn.com/2012/10/10/wor…

— Cheryl Herbsman (@cherylherbsman) October 10, 2012

I emailed Herbsman a few questions, which she was gracious enough to answer. I’ve lightly edited this exchange for grammar and content.

CD: Growing up, what kinds of things did you hear from your father about what he worked on?

CRH: Growing up, I don’t think my siblings and I necessarily understood what our father was researching. We knew it had to do with receptors, but that might have been the full extent of our understanding. Sometimes he would talk at dinner about whether the research was going well or not. Occasionally he would take us to the lab with him on a Saturday morning, where we would have wheeled desk-chair races and explore the walk-in refrigerators. Often, we would hear him dictate papers into his Dictaphone. The words didn’t mean much to us. But I remember my younger sister writing up “scientific papers” of her own with a lot of important-sounding made-up words. My dad always ended the dictation by saying, “RJL etc.” So my sister ended hers with her initials, etc., as well.

How much did you and your siblings realize how well-known your dad’s work was? Did you have any idea he might win a Nobel Prize someday?

When we were kids we didn’t realize how important his research would become. But as we got older, and he began winning more recognition for his work, it became more and more clear how much his work mattered. All of us, and my children as well, were lucky enough to attend the ceremony at the White House when he received the National Medal of Science.

Did your dad’s science career have any effect on your relationship with science in school and in life? How so?

I don’t know if it affected my relationship with science. He never pressured any of us to follow in his footsteps. But I think his dedication to his work taught me to work hard, to hang in there when things weren’t going the way I wanted them to, and to never give up.

In the acknowledgements for your novel, “Breathing”, you mentioned your father’s support. That’s interesting to me because others have been talking today about your father’s skills as a mentor. What about your dad do you think makes him a good advice-giver or giver of support?

He has always been someone who can think things through rationally, so he made a great sounding board. He was able to keep his own opinions out of the equation, so he could help us figure out what it was we really wanted to do. He has a way of being reassuring in stressful times, staying calm, trusting that things will work out. In addition, he always encouraged me to go after my dreams. He made me believe that with enough determination I could make them reality.

Is it true you babysat for Brian Kobilka’s kids?

I did babysit for Brian Kobilka’s kids for a week one summer when they needed childcare. I remember watching Nickelodeon with them and making Rice Krispie Treats.

What do you most want the world to know about your dad?

He is a dedicated and passionate man who truly loves what he does. He has often told me that he feels very fortunate that work to him is like play, and some days he can’t believe they pay him to do it. He said he thought this was one of life’s great secrets – that is, to find work one truly loves.

Chew on some tidbits of science I picked up at the show, some of which are connected to past C&EN coverage.

AUTHENTICATING OLIVE OIL

At the booth for Daskara, an extra-virgin olive oil brand from the West Bank, I spoke about olive oil authentication with Nancy Ash, who’s participated in taste panels for multiple bodies, including the California Olive Oil Council, and who consults for multiple olive oil producers, including Daskara. As Sarah Everts reported in C&EN in 2009, olive oil is big business, which has made olive oil fraud a big problem.

Authentication is important for new producers to succeed in the specialty food market, but “many people feel the current standard is not strict enough and is not well-enforced,” Ash says. USDA enacted new standards for grades of olive oil in 2010, but the standards are voluntary.

Ash told me the American Oil Chemists’ Society, a membership society for researchers studying fats, oils, and detergents, is planning a proficiency testing series for olive oil sensory panels for this fall. (Sensory panels are trained to certify olive oils submitted by producers or importers). I confirmed this information with AOCS spokesperson Emily Wickstrom, who says enrollment for the testing for professional sensory panels should open at AOCS’s site this week.

SPACE-AGE PACKAGING

As someone who loved astronaut ice cream as a kid, I was drawn to a press release from snack company Buddy Fruits, which claimed to use the same packaging techniques as NASA for its drinkable blended fruit products. The pouch-like packaging the company uses is not new, I learned. It’s made from a flexible, laminated film with a straw built into the inside of the pouch. Buddy Fruits’ containers come from an Italian firm called Gualapack. That company entered the market in 1988, after reaching an agreement with Japanese company Hosokawa Yoko for production and marketing of the packages. Here’s a 1988 patent for a “Beverage Container” from Hosokawa Yoko. The patent notes the container body is made from a four-layer laminated film consisting of a polyester film, aluminum foil, nylon film, and polyethylene film. Buddy Fruits was not the only product using this packaging–I also saw it with French baby food Yabon. I’m still looking for the NASA connection. This story from manufacturing trade publication Industry Today mentions NASA using pail liners of a similar design aboard the space shuttle.

SUGAR SUBSTITUTES
Plenty of products featuring rebiana, the zero-calorie sweetener from the Stevia rebaudiana plant, were on display at the show. But even Stevia isn’t immune to questions about its natural-ness, because the extraction procedure for the substance requires ethanol. Now, as far as I’m concerned, a molecule’s a molecule no matter where it comes from. But as I’ve learned from covering the pink slime debacle, when it comes to food, transparency and perception matter just as much if not more than science.

I spoke with Roberto E. Tejada, general manager of Caribbean Liquid Sugar, about the “natural sweetener” trend. Tejada’s firm produces an invert sugar syrup (pdf), and it also makes a blend of invert sugar and rebiana. Invert sugar contains fructose and glucose in roughly equal proportions. “Our Stevia extracts are obtained using a water-based process by mechanically pressing the Stevia leaves,” Tejada says. “This process is free of alcohols or hydrochloric acids and we make periodic visits to our vendors to audit their process.” I’ve contacted the company to ask about the patent status of the extraction process and I will update when I hear back. UPDATE July 3: I’ve heard from a company representative who says the process is patent pending.

SALT AND PEPPER
Not all salt’s the same, and Chef Keith Keogh knows it. Keogh, a former president of the California Culinary Academy, put people through the paces of salty and spicy tastes at a workshop during the show. Participants tasted a series of different salts and different pepper spices in a defined order, and Keogh explained taste observations along the way. The workshop didn’t reveal anything new about taste–it was meant to highlight some observations about flavor that might help in the kitchen or at the dinner party.

For instance, Keogh said sea and marsh salts’ more complex flavors (as compared to run-of-the-mill table salt or powdery popcorn salt) are due to their more complex ionic makeup. These salts contain small amounts of magnesium, potassium, sulfate, and other ions besides sodium and chloride.

“Some people claim that salt that tastes diff is just caused by difference in shape,” says Shirley O. Corriher, a biochemist and author of multiple books about applying science in the kitchen. “That’s not true, because people can taste differences in solutions of salts.”

Keogh’s taste tests were also set up to show that adding sugar to a spicy pepper, such as chipotle, lessens the pepper’s heat, while adding vinegar to pepper enhances it.

VEGAN CHEESE
It’s not easy going vegan. And one of the toughest parts of the process, according to this April NYTimes article, is adjusting to vegan dairy substitutes.

I visited the Wayfare Foods booth to chat about what goes into a vegan dairy product. As a post from NPR food blog The Salt explains, cheeses’ ability to melt and stretch comes from casein, a protein found in milk. A protein from animals’ milk is not an option in a vegan product, so producers have to blend proteins, gums, fats, and solids in just the right way to mimic dairy’s texture and properties. Wayfare’s products get their protein from different blends of oats, millet, lima beans, and rice.

The company makes cheese spreads, sour cream, and puddings. Each product starts with a different combination of grains as its base. Cheeses begin with water and oats, while sour cream starts with a blend of water, lima beans, rice, oats, and oat bran. Puddings start with the sour cream base and add millet to the mix. Wayfare’s ingredient list also includes a coconut and safflower oil blend (fats, check!), and locust bean gum, which comes from the carob tree. The cheesy flavor comes from a variety of spices including pimentos and onion powder, as well as nutritional yeast, a form of yeast that is typically grown on molasses.

All images Drahl/C&EN

GZA takes science songwriting seriously. Credit: Sophia Chang

The e-mail arrived in David Kaiser’s inbox late last year. “Would you like to meet an internationally-renowned hip-hop artist?” the subject beckoned. “There’s only one response to that,” says Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at MIT. “And that’s, ‘Yes, how can I help?’”

With that, one of the most interdisciplinary collaborations of Kaiser’s career was born. In December, he made the acquaintance of GZA, a founding member of legendary rap group the Wu-Tang Clan. At the time, GZA was in the planning stages for an album entitled “Dark Matter,” which as reported in this week’s issue is inspired by science in general and the quantum world and the cosmos in particular. GZA and Kaiser have sat down twice for freewheeling conversations about quantum theory and cosmology. Together with three other physicists, they’ve even discussed the similarities and differences in how budding rappers and budding academicians seek out mentors. Kaiser’s just one of the many scientists with whom GZA, a.k.a. Gary Grice, has powwowed about science. The list includes some of the most illustrious names in the business, including MIT marine biologist Penny Chisholm and Hayden Planetarium director Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Of course, it’s far from the first time someone’s rapped about chemistry. We’ve covered chemists who produce tracks with a college-chemistry-major education bent. And as reader Barney Grubbs, an associate professor of chemistry at Stony Brook University, points out, Sacramento hip-hop duo Blackalicious produced a number called “Chemical Calisthenics”.

But that music lacks the public outreach mission that GZA says “Dark Matter” has. When the album drops this fall, it will come with a companion illustrated book, and possibly also a glossary, the Wall Street Journal reports. “Neil DeGrasse Tyson calls himself a ‘popularizer of science,’ ” GZA says. “I would like to be that someday as well.”

Crafting lyrics for “Dark Matter” will be about more than just random utterances of scientific terms to fit a rhythm, GZA adds. In fact, he says words’ meanings have always been integral to his creative process. Nicknamed “The Genius,” GZA is known for lyrics that refer to philosophy and chess in addition to science, and a voracious curiosity about many fields. “I would never force in a term–science-related or not– just because it seems right,” he says.

Still, “Dark Matter” is likely to become a talking point among chemists who get frustrated that science is portrayed inaccurately in the entertainment world. When it comes to balancing scientific accuracy and artistry, GZA says he stands in the middle. “I think it’s important that science be represented but it should be accurate, particularly because shows hire scientists as consultants,” he says. “As an avid chess player, I might notice errors on the screen on a chess board, but it wouldn’t necessarily get under my skin as a viewer. But if I were the director, I would absolutely correct it.”

GZA hasn’t spoken to any chemists– yet. But he’s certainly open to the idea. In other words, Newscripts readers, keep an eye on your e-mail.

Some of the science stories that thrill me most are ones about researchers traveling to isolated spots on the globe in search of never-before-described species. For that reason, I’m a fan of the annual top 10 list of new species put out by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. (See my Newscripts column on the 2011 list.)

Since 2008, the institute has published the list as a way to raise people’s awareness of the Earth’s biodiversity. It announces the list each year on May 23, the birthday of Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy.

Botanists, zoologists, entomologists, and other scientists report about 18,000 newly described species every year. The institute solicits nominations for its top 10 from experts and the public via its website. This year, a committee of 13 scientists considered more than 200 nominees.

This year’s top 10 includes a pale yellow poppy that grows at an elevation of 10,000 feet in the Himalayas, an iridescent blue tarantula that crawls along the Amazon River basin, and a Malaysian fungus named after the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants (C&EN Senior Editor Jyllian Kemsley wrote about the fungus for Newscripts back in 2011).

Here are my favorites.

Bulbophyllum nocturnum – The night-blooming orchid.

You may have to stay up late to catch this orchid’s flowers opening. Credit: Jaap Vermeulen

André Schuiteman of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, in the U.K., and his colleagues observed the nighttime flowers only after a colleague brought the plant back from a rainforest in Papua New Guinea. By light of day, the researcher had found it growing on a fallen tree.

When the botanists started cultivating the orchid in the U.K., they noticed small flower buds, but never actually saw them open. “Someone had the bright idea to bring the plant home and see what it did at night,” Schuiteman says. The scientist then witnessed the flowers opening after 10 p.m. and closing by morning.

The team doesn’t know which species of insect pollinates the orchid. Schuiteman suspects some species of fly mistakes the odd-looking flowers for fungus. The yellow-green flowers have “strange appendages that move with the slightest air current,” Schuiteman says. “They look like fungi or insects or spiders.” They also have a faint fungus-like odor, he says.

Kollasmosoma sentum – The dive-bombing wasp.

This tiny wasp has to be stealthy to lay its eggs in an ant. Credit: C. van Achterberg

José-María Gómez Durán of the National Institute for Agriculture and Food Research and Technology, in Madrid, is an amateur ant enthusiast. One day in 2010, he was filming ant colonies in the parking lot outside the building where he works. When he watched the videos, he noticed tiny wasps hovering a centimeter off the ground outside the ant nest. These 2-mm-long wasps would sometimes dart at the worker ants.

Wasps attacking ants didn’t surprise him: Some families of the flying insects are known for laying their eggs inside ants. But what did surprise him was the wasps’ strafing speed. Each attack lasted, on average, 0.05 seconds.

He shared his observations with Kees van Achterberg of the Netherlands Center for Biodiversity Naturalis, who studies European parasitic wasps. Van Achterberg was amazed not only by the wasps’ quickness, but also by the complex acrobatics they go through to inject their egg into the ant.

The wasp lands on the ant and grabs onto its back-end. Like a gymnast on a pommel horse, the parasitic insect then twists and flips to position itself in the right spot to puncture the ants’ exoskeleton and drop in an egg.

Van Achterberg says the wasp has to move quickly because the genus of ant it attacks (Cataglyphis) can become very agitated when approached. A slower wasp might get a smack from a back leg or, even worse, attacked by the ants’ crushing mandibles.

The wasp larva develops inside the ant for about three weeks, while the ant is still alive. But just before the larva enters the pupa stage, it devours the ant’s organs and the insect dies. Eventually a female wasp emerges from the ant carcass and the cycle continues.

Halicephalobus mephisto – The devil’s worm.

No known multicellular organism lives deeper in the Earth than this nematode. Credit: G. Borgonie, Ghent University, Belgium

T.C. Onstott of Princeton University, Gaetan Borgonie of Ghent University, in Belgium, and their colleagues spotted the nematodes in water trapped between subterranean rock formations. When miners drill a new mine, their giant drill bits sometimes pierce through rock holding back pockets of this water. If the miners can’t easily drain the water, they close off the holes and find a new direction to drill in. “For the miners, it’s really a pain to run into these fluid-filled fractures,” Onstott says. “But it’s our window into what life exists down there.” The researchers passed several thousands of liters of this deep water through filters like the ones in swimming pools to catch the microscopic worms.

Based on radioisotope dating, the researchers estimate that this water hasn’t touched the Earth’s surface in 5,000 to 25,000 years. The water certainly provides an extreme environment for the worms: Its temperature is about 37 ºC; its oxygen concentrations are 1/10 those found at the surface; and it is loaded with methane gas.

Understanding how this worm and its bacterial neighbors have evolved to live in these conditions, Onstott says, could help biologists imagine what life might be like below the surface of other planets. Studying the organisms is “sort of a substitute for going to Mars and looking for life,” he says, “which isn’t going to happen in my lifetime.”

Rhinopithecus strykeri – The sneezing monkey.

Even if it doesn’t sneeze when it rains, this snub-nosed monkey is still kind of cute. Credit: Thomas Geissmann/Fauna & Flora International

Thomas Geissmann of University of Zurich and his colleagues found the new species in a mountainous region of Myanmar. The team was in Myanmar to estimate the population size of Hoolock gibbons, Geissmann’s main interest, and to survey the primate’s habitat. As part of the survey, they interviewed hunters from nearby villages to get a sense of what other animals lived in the gibbons’ area. “These people spend much of their time in the forests and know the most about the animals there,” Geissmann says.

In late 2010, they interviewed a hunter from the northern part of the country who described an all-black monkey. At first, the interviewer thought he was describing a species of leaf monkey (Trachypithecus). But when he showed the hunter a picture of a leaf monkey, the hunter said it wasn’t the one he saw. The monkey he spotted had an up-turned nose.

The nose description fit that of a snub-nosed monkey, which has small winglike needles above each nostril. But no scientist had ever seen a snub-nosed monkey in Myanmar. Geissmann’s team eventually bumped into another hunter who had trapped one of the monkeys. When they examined the monkey, the researchers determined it was a new species.

People in the area also told the team a cute anecdote about the monkeys: When it rains, the critters sneeze because water falls into their odd-shaped noses. Sadly, Geissmann thinks this is a legend. He points out that snub-nosed monkeys often make staccato calls to their peers that sound like tiny sneezes.

After further surveys in the area, the team concluded that only about 260 to 330 of these monkeys exist. With such a small population and heavy hunting in the area, the species could go extinct in a few decades, Geissmann thinks.

He says his team was lucky to have spotted these monkeys before they disappeared. “Here we discovered something completely new and it could have been easily lost to the world if we had come maybe 20 years later,” Geissmann says. “But who knows, maybe there are more species waiting in small forest pockets, waiting to be discovered.”

UPDATED 6/7/12: Corrected Kees van Achterberg’s name.

I thought I’d share with you why I sent out said request. Part of the reason is to have a handy list of hashtags for chemists in one place. But it also has to do with my upcoming talk at the San Diego ACS national meeting. I’m part of ACS President Bassam Shakhashiri’s symposium, “Communicating Science to the Public”, which takes place Monday afternoon in the convention center. Click on the image to get the full lineup from the meeting program.

I’ll be talking about how C&EN reporters have our collective ears to ground of the chemistry world, and from time to time end up being sources of information for media outlets with a broader reach. For example, C&EN reporter and Fine Line blogger extraordinaire Rick Mullin was a guest on NPR’s Science Friday earlier this month, talking about unusual pharma partnerships. And in January I went on SiriusXM’s Doctor Radio channel to chat about how drugs get their generic names.

We reporters keep tabs on what chemists are talking about in many ways, but I’d like to emphasize Twitter in my talk (even though it is limited to a small group of chemists who are self-selecting to communicate with social media).

That’s where you and your hashtags come in. I could think of a few hashtags that have become symbolic of issues chemists care about.

#chemjobs – chemistry employment
#altchemicalfree – chemophobia in advertising and the mass media
#SheriSangji – everything related to the lab fire that killed UCLA lab assistant Sheri Sangji and the ongoing case, but I’ve also seen it referred to in general discussions of safety in chemistry labs

And so I decided to put out the call to see if any more such hashtags would pop out at me from the big list. Of course, many hashtags come and go, and some are more active than others. And still others are just for fun, like #chemvalentine, which was a collection of chemistry related love missives timed to Valentine’s Day. But I strongly believe that chemists are using social media to talk about issues that matter to them, and the number of issues is only going to go up the longer those channels are around. Anyone in the business of covering or communicating chemistry should be up on those conversations.

I’ll happily take more hashtag suggestions, or suggestions for meaningful conversations happening on Twitter, all the way up to Sunday March 25th. Email me or send me a message on Twitter @carmendrahl.
In the meantime, here’s the collection of hashtags you sent so far. Please note: I haven’t checked all of these to see whether they are active.

#chemistry (which, as Adam Azman points out, has been co-opted for other purposes as well).
#chemicals
#openaccess
#icanhazpdf
#arseniclife
#clinicaltrials
#drugs
#pharma
#biotech
#STEM
#REACH
#climate
#chemhistory
#knuckledraggingorganicker
#lovehatechem
#inorgchem
#orgchem
#physchem
#compchem
#chem
#reachchem
#phneutral
#nonhazchem
#nontoxichem
#chemtag
#toxnetchem
UPDATED March 21:
Thanks to folks who emailed me or sent me a message on Twitter with a few more hashtags.
#chemsafety
#polymer or #polymers
#plastic
#rubber

Horner (at right) speaks with astrobiologists at the FameLab workshop. (Drahl/C&EN)

Still prepping your video audition for that PBS chemistry show hosting gig? Then you might want to glean some tips from an ongoing NASA competition. It’s the NASA Astrobiology FameLab, and it’s essentially a search for the next Carl Sagan.

FameLab, founded in the U.K. in 2005, is all about the power of words to get the public and stakeholders excited about science. No slides, no graphs allowed in your short presentation.

That can be daunting for most scientists, especially the early-career folks FameLab seeks. So FameLab’s organizers include a mentoring and training component in the competition. For Friday’s preliminary FameLab round at National Geographic in D.C., that mentor was Beth Horner, an award-winning professional storyteller. Last Friday afternoon at NASA headquarters, Horner put 25 young astrobiologists through their storytelling paces. I journeyed to NASA to bring you the top five tips for science communication from her workshop. Here they are:

5) “Never do anything off the cuff. Always plan.”
It’s easy to think that you’ll be able to come up with a way to explain your work on the fly, but you’re less likely to forget a part of your message if you structure things in advance, Horner says. She showed workshop attendees how to storyboard and led several exercises in which she asked the scientists to write down three lines about something–themselves, a mentor in their field, or key aspects of their research. “That three-line thing is the start of a structure,” she said. Questions or issues might come up during your talk that may force you to improvise somewhat, she added, but you should let your structure be a guide so you don’t veer off course.

4) “It’s not about you. It’s about this information you’re trying to get across.”
Horner mentioned this mantra as a way of calming nerves onstage or on camera.

Early-career astrobiologists listen to Horner at the FameLab workshop. (Drahl/C&EN)

3) “Always try out your material on someone else.”
Horner always runs story ideas and analogies by colleagues to see what they think. “I ask them, ‘Do you care about this?’,” she says. “You get in your own head sometimes and it’s hard to get out,” but an outside perspective can give you clues about what might resonate with a listener and what won’t, she says.

2) “Tell a story.”
Every culture on Earth has a storytelling tradition, Horner says. “That means something,” she adds. Stories were a way for people to pass down lessons and traditions, and there’s something about their structure that sticks with you. It isn’t easy to structure science like a story, but the approach is likely to pay off, she says.

1) “Know your listener and connect with them.”
Communicating science with the general public might be too general a term as far as Horner is concerned. A talk will need to be different for 2nd graders, high school students, and policymakers. Know the issues that your audience cares about and relate your work to them, Horner says. When she travels for a storytelling gig, she asks the person who picks her up at the airport what the zeitgeist of the area is, and whether any big events have happened there lately. Then she adapts her story to what she learns.

I livetweeted the competition at National Geographic on Friday night. Congratulations to winner Noah Hammond of the SETI Institute!

Want more FameLab? Watch entries on the FameLab YouTube channel.