The Best Australian Science Writing 2015

by Heidi Norman

  Towed sonars are attractive because they can cover large areas relatively quickly – an important advantage given that ATSB officials are giving bidders just 300 days to explore the 32 000 square kilometre search area due to intense public interest.

  But they are also sometimes hard to manipulate. Searching for the AHS Centaur, a World War II-era hospital ship, in 2009, scientists had to tow a sonar device with more than 6 kilometres of cable through a ravine 90 metres wide. They likened it to the movie Star Wars, when fighters flew through a narrow trench at high speeds to unload a final shot to destroy the fictional Death Star. One device snapped off its cable and was lost.

  The AUVs, by contrast, can be programmed to navigate finicky terrain. But AUVs cover less ground because their batteries can’t power energy-intensive sonars, and they cannot be operated in rough seas as they have to be hauled back on deck each day, placing a ship’s crew at risk.

  They also can go haywire. Woods Hole’s flagship deep-sea AUV, the Nereus, imploded under high pressure off the coast of New Zealand in May. Another multimillion-dollar AUV, the REMUS 6000, failed to resurface on a recent research trip. ‘The decision, fortunately or unfortunately, in the end rests with me,’ said Mr Dolan.

  Most of the firms that spoke with The Wall Street Journal said they were bidding as part of consortia, as very few have the equipment, ships and expertise to carry out the massive search alone. A number have already descended upon Canberra to make their cases, including Mr Wright of Williamson & Associates, who along with Mr Mearns of Blue Water Recoveries worked earlier with Australian officials to locate a torpedoed World War II Australian warship. Ms Keller of Metron said she would relocate to Canberra to operate a data centre crunching sonar images from search ships and updating authorities, if her firm wins the bid.

  Once the search is finished, if the whole seabed ends up being mapped, the area will be the most comprehensively interrogated strip of ocean in the world, Mr Dolan of the ATSB said. Scientists will know every boulder and divot that dots its surface. Whether that includes Flight 370 remains to be seen.

  Postscript: Following the completion of tender arrangements, Fugro NV were awarded the contract to carry out the search for MH370 alongside a team hired by Malaysia. In April 2015 Australia, Malaysia and China committed to doubling the search zone to 120 000 square kilometres, an area roughly the size of England. At the time of publication, more than 48 000 square kilometres of this part of the remote Indian Ocean sea floor had been scanned with high-definition sonar devices, turning up new volcano formations, a shipwreck, but no sign of the missing plane.

  All dressed up for Mars and nowhere to go

  Robots on a roll

  Field guide to the future

  Ian Lunt

  I could ask, ‘what was your first field guide?’ but my first field guides belonged to my parents, not me. So instead I’ll ask, ‘what was the first field guide you remember using?’

  I remember two: Trees of Victoria by Leon Costermans – a permanent resident of the car glove box – and Birds of the Ranges by the Gould League. I am indebted to the authors and illustrators of both. Without them, I might have led a different life.

  Our Costermans bore the hallmark of a truly great field guide; after years of abuse, we stripped it of every skerrick of resale value. One summer, someone put a block of copha in the car glove box to protect it from the sun. When discovered weeks later, everything floated in a pool of coconut fat. It was awesome. Costermans was indestructible. Like the trees inside it, we created the world’s first rip-proof, waterproof, scented and highly combustible field guide to eucalypts.

  * * * * *

  What makes a field guide truly great? There are four rules. Every great guide must be: (1) distinctive, (2) attractive, (3) well organised, and, most important of all, (4) impeccably accurate. As in life, one small mistake about eye colour (‘Your eyes are a beautiful brown’. ‘Aah, they’re green actually’), and into the reject bin we fall.

  Many of the great guides are also (5) exhaustively comprehensive, but that rule isn’t rigid. Comprehensiveness is equally an asset and a liability. A good field guide can’t be huge; it has to fit in the backpack.

  * * * * *

  Our generation witnessed and abetted the great migration. The migration of information from paper, plastic, canvas and vinyl, to invisible strings of zeroes and ones. The migration to digital. Never despair, books won’t disappear; familiarity breeds contempt for usurpers. It’s hard to find content, let alone contentment, in a replacement; especially one with no pages.

  Yet resist as we will, the next generation of great field guides won’t be on paper, but on a device. The Compleat Naturalist of the future will treasure a phone more than a library. To my offspring, a bird in the handset is worth three in a book.

  * * * * *

  What will we demand from the digital field guides of the future? That they be distinctive, attractive, well organised, accurate? These maxims won’t change, but one rule will vanish and a new rule will emerge. Comprehensiveness will no longer be a liability. Size won’t matter, as the longest field guide need be no bigger than the shortest. Every entry in a digital field guide can expand and contract like a concertina, from mug-shot to museum and back again.

  As encyclopedias shrink in the palm of our hand, the field guides of the future lie prone to a new imperative: be popular. In the olde days, greatness led to popularity. In the digital world, popularity leads to greatness; not through imitation, but through content creation. As each user adds and shares new information, the most popular guides will blossom and grow, while the wallflower guides wither and die.

  * * * * *

  Many field guides have migrated from paper to digital. Some synced smoothly from book to app. Others grew in stature as they shrunk in size. Augmented by libraries of recorded calls, the better guides to frogs and birds can now be viewed, and heard, on a mobile phone. Can’t tell a Crinia signifera from Crinia parinsignifera? The pictures won’t help, but the calls certainly will.

  Calls aside, this first generation of digital field guide is characterised by the ‘silent cinema syndrome’. Remember the first silent movies? How quaint and silly they appear? The pioneers of the silent movie transported an old aesthetic to a new technology. They pushed the stage show onto the silver screen. But they created nothing new, beyond a distribution network. They had no concept for the cinematic. The art of cinema evolved later, as unruly directors liberated film from the stagecraft of the theatre. The evolution of cinema was enabled by technology and directed by new worlds of imagination.

  A century beyond the birth of cinema, we squeezed great books onto the small screen. We added a soundtrack. But we are yet to generate a new genre, a new art form, worthy of the title, the Truly Great Digital Field Guide.

  * * * * *

  A young phone has a great eye, perfect ears, superb short-term memory, an encyclopedic brain, and looks fantastic.

  Too anthropomorphic? A little bit creepy? Let’s try again. A modern phone has a sensitive microphone, quality camera, accurate voice recorder and connects to the cloud. Thanks to a GPS, it knows exactly where it is most of the time, which is more than I can claim. The fab guides of the future will feast on every one of these features. Why? Check out my apps.

  Hear a song you don’t know? Grab your phone, point to the sound and – Shazam – the name of the song, artist and album appears in a flash, with links to biography, lyrics and videos. It’s magical. My phone records a sound bite, sends it to a satellite, compares it to a database, and sends me back the artist’s face.

  If this is possible, then why do I have to scroll manually through frog call after frog call to work out which critter is croaking in the dam? Surely a Truly Great digital field guide should tell me who made the call?

  * * * * *

  What about that camera? Leafsnap is a groundbreaking app for identifying plants in north-east America. Point your phone at a plant, take a photo of a leaf, beam it to the
cloud, and it shoots back a list of potential species, with additional photos of fruits, flowers and distinguishing features. There’s no need to measure the leaf, or to look up a glossary to determine if it’s palmate or pinnate, just point, snap and leave the work to the app.

  Every meat-eater knows that Leafsnap has limited potential; most leaves look the same to a carnivore. But picture a smorgasbord of photo ID apps, like FruitSnap, BudSnap, BarkSnap and EucSnap. Australia has over 700 species of Eucalyptus, all with distinctive fruits (‘gum-nuts’), buds and bark. Two or three photos should be all it takes for EucSnap to identify most trees. Photograph a fruit, send it to the cloud, and receive a shortlist of possible species, filtered by locality. Snap some buds, send them back up, and the shortlist shrinks again. Can’t tell your Snugglepot from Cuddlepie? Just shoot a gum-nut to the sky.

  * * * * *

  Shazam nails song identification. It gets ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails every time I play it. It knows its covers, and gets ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash every time too, just like me. But bird songs aren’t pop songs. Both versions of ‘Hurt’ always sound the same. The crimson rosella outside my window doesn’t.

  A bird is an artist with an improvised repertoire. Blackbirds sing more songs than the Beatles ever sang. To contain a bird, a library must call upon a discography, not a whistle. To make it harder, blackbirds ain’t blackbirds. Birds have accents.

  * * * * *

  In 2011, a science reporter at the University of Wisconsin wrote an enthusiastic press release about WeBIRD; a phone app to let users, ‘record a nearby bird’s call, submit that song wirelessly to a server and retrieve a positive ID of the species’. Shazam.

  Apparently, the prototype identified the resident birds of Wisconsin really well. Users could upload a call and download an ID, as the press release promised. But beyond Wisconsin, WeBIRD went wonky, as many birds sing different tunes in different towns. WeBIRD couldn’t cope with accents. Its vocal files were too localised. It needed a bigger jukebox.

  The solution? Collect more songs and data files and try again. Surely, centuries of natural history should provide reams of data to train a smart app? Yes and no. We’ve got piles of information. It’s just the wrong type. Or rather it’s all type. It’s all text.

  * * * * *

  Words are cheap. Since birth, natural history has been subject to this economic dictum of the printing press. Images and sounds are expensive to reproduce, so generations of biologists created ways to translate images and sounds into words.

  Botanists penned glossaries to describe undrawn plants: ‘leaves conduplicate, seeds tuberculate, indumentum villose, calyx accrescent’. The efficiency of communication is exemplary. A Handbook to the Plants of Victoria Volume II. Dicotyledons, published in 1972, distinguishes 2290 species in 832 pages without a single picture. Unburdened by art, both volumes – plus lunch, water, camera and coat – fit snugly in my day-pack.

  With a budget for paint – one illustration per species – but none for sound, cheerful ornithologists turned to onomatopoeia: ‘Pee-pee-pee-peeooo, Wee-willy-weet-weet, It-wooa-weet-sip, Zzzt zzzt zzzt. Cher-cher-cherry-cherry, Wah-i-wah-i-wah-oo, Twitchy tweedle, Kupa-ko-ko, Lik-lik-lik’. Less cheerful colleagues followed suit: ‘Chop-chop, Four o’clock, Wide-a-wake, Walk to work. Want a whip? It’s for teacher. Tweet-your-juice, Sweet pretty creature’. (All real calls, I assure you.)

  * * * * *

  ‘Writing about bird songs is like dancing about architecture.’

  As Napster broke the music industry, the MP3 file made redundant a century of imaginative onomatopoeia. WeBIRD cannot hear the poetry of a Flame Robin – ‘You may come, if you wish, to the sea’ – in the sonogram of a bird call. Leafsnap cannot see ‘foliage trifoliate, margins runcinate’ in a snapshot of a leaf.

  Like these pioneering apps, the great field guides of the future will identify species by algorithm not allusion. Algorithms that characterise the geometry of a scale pattern, the spikes and troughs of a sonogram. Algorithms that interrogate hundreds of images and calls to capture the geography of accents and provenance. Algorithms that will always appreciate a little help from a human:

  Phone: ‘Excuse me, Megan, is that a New Holland Honeyeater I hear calling behind you?’

  Megan: ‘Where? Oh, I see it, no it’s an Eastern Spinebill. Good try Hal, their calls are really similar.’

  Phone: ‘Thank you for the correction, Megan. I shall upload the identified call to improve the database for next time.’

  * * * * *

  Will we like the field guides of the future? Will EucSnap ever replace my coconut-scented Costermans? Will we stick with our bulky books, long glossaries and child-friendly bird calls? The ‘warm, intimate vinyl’ sounds of the past?

  Your preferences don’t matter. Neither do mine. You already have a guide, you already value nature. What really matters is whether a phone full of apps can help a new generation of ‘digital natives’ to value and conserve the diversity and beauty of the natural world.

  I hope so. I hope my grandchildren pocket a galaxy of guides to nature’s delights, and use it to call on the soundscape of the planet. If they do, they’ll never need to ask, ‘can we squeeze another field guide in the glove box?’ They’ll just need to be careful with the coconut oil.

  What shall we teach the children

  Lost in a floral desert

  How I rescued my brain

  David Roland

  I’m having trouble working out where I am. I’m in a puzzle and need to put together the clues to work out what this is about.

  I’m sitting in a row of beige plastic chairs. When I turn my head, I realise that my wife, Anna, is next to me. Other people, scattered around the room, are flicking through magazines or shuffling their feet. I get the feeling that they don’t want to be here.

  The sunlight slanting through the windows is soft; it must be morning light. I look up to see a woman behind a counter. She seems harassed, and her hair hasn’t been brushed recently.

  We seem to be in some sort of waiting room, but I don’t know why.

  In one corner of the room, on a low table, there are piles of magazines. I walk over to pick up Country Life. There’s a section on real estate: quaint, homely looking cottages and sandstone mansions. There’s one I like: a cute cottage with a garden for $350 000. Is that a lot of money? I used to know. When I look at the date on the cover, I realise that I don’t know what year it is now. The names of the towns in the ads seem familiar, but when I try to picture where they are, I can’t; my sense of geography is wavy. Goulburn, I say to myself. Nothing. Cooma. Still nothing.

  How did I get to this room? A fragment comes into my mind – a dreamlike image – of Anna driving and me vomiting out of the car window. Did this happen?

  I turn to Anna and see she’s crying quietly: her cheeks are pink; the rims of her eyes are red. I put my arm around her shoulder and pat her gently. ‘It’ll be all right,’ I say. She quiets a little. After a while I take my arm back and return to Country Life.

  Then a man in white appears, like a jack-in-the-box, out of a doorway. He calls out my name and holds the door ajar. It has an important-looking sign on it: ‘Clinical Initiatives Nurse’.

  Anna and I get up and follow him in.

  The man has a sense of energy about him. We sit down opposite each other, knee-to-knee. He brings his face, with intense, smiling eyes, close to mine. ‘Now, David,’ he says. ‘Can you tell me what day of the week it is?’ His expression is encouraging.

  I think hard. ‘It’s Wednesday … or it could be Thursday.’

  ‘Where are you now?’ he asks.

  ‘Is it a hospital?’

  ‘What is the last thing you remember happening?’

  ‘I was playing guitar with my friend Nick. Last night.’

  He asks more questions, but either I don’t know the answers or can’t remember the question by the time he’s finished speaking. As he talks, his words appear in my mind slowly. They often disapp
ear before I can get hold of them, as if they are in a line, each being jostled along by the next.

  He tells me something that seems important but I don’t catch it. Then he’s gone.

  A nurse shows me to a room. I’m about to sit on the bed when I catch sight of a long, horizontal strip of glowing orange, topped with purple and black, through the window. What is it? I stare and stare; I can’t work it out. Then I realise: it’s a sunset.

  How could this be? It was just morning.

  I stand and watch the orange glow become thinner and more intense as the black above it grows. The lights in the room get brighter, and begin to sting my eyes. It must be night. Incredible.

  * * * * *

  This morning is different from yesterday. It feels as if I’ve woken from a dream. I’m sure now that I’m in hospital. I remember more clearly the night before I came in. I’d woken with a headache, taken a Panadol, and gone back to bed. That’s the last memory I have before being here.

  A nurse tells me that the specialist will be doing his rounds this morning and will discuss my test results with me. I’m keen to know what the results say.

  The phone beside my bed rings, interrupting my reverie. It’s my psychiatrist, Dr Banister. Anna has called him, he says. ‘What’s happened?’ he asks.

  I tell him that I can’t recall most of yesterday.

  ‘What do you think brought this on?’

  I remember I’d had a huge panic attack the day before I came to hospital.

  Dr Banister asks me what tests have been done. I mention a CT scan and blood tests, and say I’m waiting to discuss the results.

  ‘You may have had a psychogenic fugue: an episode of amnesia. But we’ll need to see what the results reveal. I’ll try and come in to see you. If it’s a fugue, you could stay at my clinic, Seaview Psychiatric, for a longer rest. I can discuss this with your doctor.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. That does sound good.