That Eureka! moment
You’re proud of your data…so share it with everyone…
ANYONE who has ever worked in a science lab experiences it; after meticulous planning and flawless execution, a bunch of numbers or images or blobs or squiggly lines start appearing on your computer screen or printer paper or inside squishy gels. What they bring is some scientific clarity. Eureka! Your hypothesis was correct! Or maybe it was incorrect. Either way, you used the scientific method and now are a little bit more knowledgeable. That’s cool.
Therein lies the idea of this collection — to pay homage to the excitement and experience of real-time science. Instagram may have your lobster roll from lunch, but Eureka!-gram wants your raw data. What better way to introduce the public (and your science colleagues) to what you do behind closed laboratory doors than to allow them to share in your small professional victories? And most importantly, there’s a person behind those data and there’s rarely an opportunity to capture the human element and emotion that is inseparable from the science.
Medium will make a nice home for these posts because the editing interface is clean, simple and a joy to use. The ability to easily add in-line images and insert comments close to the relevant portions of the text are not bells and whistles, but rather, essential. There are very few ground rules for this collection since I want to see what you make of this concept. I want working scientists to craft a snapshot of their experimental moment in a way that best reflects their mood. Simply post that image, data trace, protein gel, DNA sequence, structure, X-ray Fourier transform, graph, etc… that gave you your Eureka! moment. Better yet, include yourself along with your data so we can see you gloating over your success. These moments could be the culmination of an entire project, or simply a control experiment replicate that sealed the fate of your eventual interpretation. Share what you will, but hopefully the data you provide will be fresh and hot off the [insert expensive scientific equipment here]. Be sure to label what the heck we should be looking at in the data. Or keep it raw. Either way, explain to us what you did and why with a bit of text. Maybe even what the next step will be. Get creative, post a series of images showing us your layout, a “How-To” or the apparatus that provided your Eureka!-gram. Or simply post a Snapchat like image with a finger-drawn arrow towards some blob on your gel. The main goal is get us all excited about science in general and YOUR science in particular.
Of course, these Eureka! moments also occur in schools, backyards and garages around the world. At elementary school science fairs, second-graders are sticking nails into a lemon, connecting leads to a light bulb and realizing just how well citrus juices conduct electricity. In high school chemistry labs, students are finding out the hard way that strong acids need to be slowly added to water for dilution, not the other way around. In a backyard creek somewhere in Minnesota, a cool science parent is turning over stones to show her 4-year-old just how much life a big rock can carry, to the amazement of the child. Science is exciting and important. And it’s okay to get excited about what you’ve learned. But there is something unique about the home-grown experience and I feel that these moments would be better-served in a separate collection. One that may very well see the light of day in the future after this collection (maybe) gets off the ground. So for now, this Eureka! collection will consist only of data collected by working scientists in a laboratory/field setting.
To contribute, feel free to email me at maileurekagram@gmail.com with a very brief description of your data as well as a representative image and I’ll grant you posting privileges within the collection. Then you can feel free to get creative. You must have a Medium account in order to post. The permanent link for the collection is here. You can also follow along updates on this collection using Twitter or Google+.
I’m not sure where this is going, but I’ve been away from the bench for 6 years and simply want to see scientists reacting to significant raw data collection as it rolls in. Those moments of discovery were my favorite times in the lab and they need to be celebrated. Dare I say, a Eureka! moment in science engagement? We’ll see…
