Not all science news is “OMG Higgsbosongodparticle” or about boning or fashionable topics in nutrition. A great deal of it is really pretty boring, at least to most of us that aren’t directly involved in the particular field of less-sexy science being conducted. And I say this as someone that science gawks for a living. There is, however, a small army of PR people out there in the world who have the job of making every little bit of obscure research sound exciting and awesome, or at least cute.Anthropomorphism is, naturally, the most common tool. Anything can be interesting if it’s placed within the framework of human activity. Here’s a good one from the University of Michigan a few weeks ago: “Star Screams as It Gets Devoured by Black Hole.” The scream here is actually a "quasiperiodic oscillation," an x-ray signal given off by the remnants of a star broken apart by the gravity of a black hole. Or, here’s one from the European Space Agency: “X-raying the Beating Heart of a Newborn Star.” In other words, researchers are using x-rays to get past the cloak of dust that surrounds new stars. These are just a couple of highlights from a quick inbox scan, though galactic behavior is one of the more frequent things I notice getting the antro threatment.Don’t get me wrong — this isn’t a complaint at all. It’s a complement. Some of these press release headlines/metaphorizations are amazing (and presumably oft recycled by their recipients). Which brings me to the release that inspired this post. It’s anthropomorphised, sort of, but is amazing for reasons a bit more difficult to put a finger on. The headline is this: “Finicky young wrasse want shrimp,” which is a string of words that doesn’t inspire curiosity so much as it just bounces back in forth in your skull until you can’t help but read the rest of the release.And on opening that email, you would be confronted with this first paragraph: “Ballan wrasse are picky eaters when young. As adults, they eat sea lice off the skin of salmon – which makes them valuable to fish farmers. But as juveniles, wrasse want to be served shrimp.” Which is actually just another string of words that bounces around your skull until you read even more.So, the researchers are trying to figure out how to grow the wrasse such that that less-tasty fish can be used by farmers to cultivate the more-tasty fish. But the salmon farmers have this problem: normal baby fish feed isn’t good enough for baby wrasse. The baby fish demand shrimp, and apparently shrimp is more expensive. This is a bad for the bottom-line, you see.And all of this you now know because a science press release writer somewhere constructed the above headline brainworm. If you want the details of this particular study, find the whole thing here, in Norwegian.
Advertisement