As a child Solomon King Benge loved Eric Laithwaite’s 1974 book The Engineer in Wonderland, based on the mechanical engineer’s 1966 Royal Institution Christmas lectures. After reading it he asked his physics teacher if he and his classmates might try some of Laithwaite’s practical experiments, but was told: “Don’t waste your time with this. This is not important, because it’s not in the curriculum.” 

The rejection promoted Benge to launch Fundi Bots in 2011. The social education initiative aims to give education a stronger practical focus, a move away from learning by rote in front of a blackboard. Last year it reached 22,000 students, most of them in Uganda, and hopes eventually to cover one million across Africa.

Robotics is a key component of the program. Benge recalls one child in northern Uganda who built a sensor-driven robot and was asked what he might do with it. He said: “I think I can now create something that lets the goats out of the pen in the morning so that I don’t have to wake up early.”

Benge tells the How to save humanity in 17 goals podcast series: “It was hilarious for us, but a very real testament of once you empower children and make learning meaningful, then they actually begin looking at the practical applications of that learning.”

The educator and entrepreneur describes how Fundi Bots addresses SDG 4 and its aim to deliver quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030.

Each episode in the series features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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A drive to reduce suicide mortality rates is a key indicator of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Psychiatrist Shekhar Saxena, who led the World Health Organization’s mental health and substance abuse program after working in clinical practice for more than two decades, says that although progress is being made, a worryingly high number of young people are choosing to end their lives.

“They have to struggle through the school education, competitive examinations, then they have to struggle for a job,” says Saxena, who now teaches at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And many young people decide that dying is easier than struggling through for many years, which is very sad. It reflects the society that we live in where a young person does not feel that life is worth living.”

In the third episode How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series, Saxena welcomes the inclusion of mental health in SDG 3 and its aim to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. But he points out that countries on average spend less than 2% of their health budget on mental health, when the disease burden is around 10%. 

Each episode in the series features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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As a nutrition and planetary health researcher, Christopher Golden takes a keen interest in the second of 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and its aim to end hunger.

But Golden’s research also focuses on “hidden hunger,” a term he uses to describe the impact of dietary deficiencies in micronutrients such as iron, zinc, fatty acids, and vitamins A and B12.

Hidden hunger, he argues in the second episode of the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series, could be better addressed if more people adopted a diet that includes more ‘blue’ or aquatic foods. These include fish, molluscs and plant species.

Golden, who is based at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, says discussions about hunger and food security have tended to focus on terrestrial food production.

As soil nutrient levels deplete and farmland becomes scarcer as human populations rise, more attention needs to be paid to marine and freshwater food sources, he adds.

But rising sea temperatures threaten millions of people in equatorial regions whose diets are rich in blue foods. As aquatic species migrate polewards in search of cooler waters, their livelihoods and food security are at risk.

Each episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series from Nature Careers, features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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Poverty is about more than just meeting basic material needs, says Catherine Thomas. Its corrosive effects are also social and psychological, causing people to feel marginalized and helpless.

Thomas’s research into anti-poverty programs has focused on the effects of one aimed at women in the West African country of Niger, which aims to support subsistence farmers whose livelihoods are impacted by climate change.

One branch of the program involved providing an unconditional $300 cash transfer alongside business and life skills training. Thomas, who is based at the Unversity of Michigan in Ann Arbor, describes the impact it had, compared to similar schemes. These include microfinance business loans, but these tend not to reach those most in need, she says.

Thomas’s research is very much focused on the first of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which aims to end poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030. Each episode of How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a Working Scientist podcast series, features researchers whose work addresses one or more the targets. The first six episodes are produced in partnership with Nature Food, and introduced by Juliana Gil, its chief editor.

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In August the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft touched down, making India only the fourth to have successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon. In this special episode of the Working Scientist podcast, Somak Raychaudhuryan astrophysicist and vice-chancellor at Ashoka University, tells Jack Leeming about India’s history of space research, the significance of the lunar landing, and how it might help to stem a “brain drain” of Indian researchers moving abroad permanently to develop their careers. 

The episode is part of the Nature Spotlight on India, an editorially-independent supplement.

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For a three-year period as a postdoctoral researcher, molecular biologist and visual artist Daniel Jay was given both a lab and a sudio to work in. In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist about art and science, Julie Gould asks why, decades later, Jay’s experience is still unusual. Why do scientists with expertise in, say, music, sculpture, pottery or creative writing have to pursue these interests as weekend hobbies, with science “paying the bills?”

Jay, who is Dean of the graduate school of biomedical sciences at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, says today’s early career researchers want what he calls a “post disciplinary society,” offering the freedom to pick and choose different areas and competencies.

Lou Muglia, a medical geneticist who is now president and CEO of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a private foundation located in North Carolina, co-authored a 2023 paper in PloS Biology on art-science collaborations. 

Muglia says many early career researchers today don’t see themselves running a traditional lab, but are as excited about communication and the arts as they are about their science. Many funders now recognise this. Academia should too, he argues.

Callie Chappell, Muglia’s co-author and a professional artist who researches biosecurity and innovation at Stanford University, California, says: “I would argue that science is actually a type of art. 

“To do science, you have to be creative, you have to blend different ideas, you have to communicate those ideas by creating something. In many ways that's what artists do.” 

Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.

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Data form the backbone of the scientific method, but it can be impenetrable. In the penultimate episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art-science collaborations, Julie Gould talks to artists and data visualisation specialists about how they interpret and present data in art forms ranging from music to basket weaving.

Keep things simple wherever possible, agree Duncan Ross, chief data officer at the Times Higher Education publication, and James Bayliss, an interaction and visualisation analyst at Springer Nature. “My go-to tool is a pen and paper or coloured pencils,” says Bayliss. “Start slow and don't get too complicated too fast.”

Akshat Rathi, a senior climate reporter at Bloomberg News, describes how he used data to visualise the devastating impact of a 2015 earthquake in Nepal for an article in the business title Quartz.

And Nathalie Miebach, a basketware artist who created a reed sculpture based on daily weather data she had collected in Provincetown, Massachusetts, says that translating data into artwork brings up all sorts of biases and expectations.

Finally, Rebecca Fiebrink, a classically-trained musician with a PhD in computer science who now works as professor at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts, London, agrees. “Any kind of data analysis itself is creative, right?” she asks.

Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.

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GUI/GOOEY is an international online exhibition that explores digital and technological representations of the biological world.

In the fourth episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, Julie Gould talks to some of the artists and scientist whose collaborations created exhibits for the event, which ran from March to June 2023.

Its curator Laura Splan, an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, says GUI/GOOEY reconsidered how technology affects our understanding of nature and our constructions of nature. She is joined by Diana Scarborough, arist-in-residence in bionanotechnologist Ljiljana Fruk’s lab at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Scarborough describes a project involving Anna Melekhova, an inorganic chemist based in Fruk’s lab, which was influenced by an ancient method used in Mayan art to stabilise pigments using clay.

Scarborough says the film she produced to communicate Melekhova’s science depicted a “luminous jelly,” included soundtracks from space, and a conversation generated by ChatGPT to symbolise the new material coming to life.

“I was fascinated by the movement of this nonliving material. It looked really as though it is a living organism. I could very easily imagine alien species looking like this,” says Fruk, who also talks about how she and Scarborough first started working together.

Will Etheridge, a PhD student in Fruk’s lab, also attended the first screening. “It just represented this kind of embryonic substance that was just coming into being and questioning its own existence,” he says.

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In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, artists and illustrators describe examples where accuracy is key, but also ones where they can exert some artistic licence in science-based drawings, sculptures, music and installations.

For Lucy Smith, a botanical artist at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, measurement and accuracy is important, she says.

But accuracy can sometimes take a back seat for illustrator Glendon Mellow, who is also a senior marketing manager a life sciences learning and development company Red Nucleus, based in Toronto, Canada.

“When I put wings on trilobites, I’m not too concerned. It’s not likely that anything I do is going to suddenly nudge opinions into someplace they shouldn’t go on these fossils,” he says.

But what if the science changes? You need 10 to 20 years to be able to look back on data to see whether something’s accurate or not, says artist Luke Jerram, who describes a 2004 project to produce a glass models of the hepatitis C virus. ”You ask the scientists if it actually look like that?” And they say, 'Well, we don’t really know.'”

Sculptor and ceramicist Nadav Drukker outlines the challenges of capturing string theory in art, plus other concepts that form the basis of his theoretical physics research at King's College London.

Kelly Krause, creative director at Springer Nature, explains how the art displayed on a Nature front cover comes about, and how she and her team aim to strike the right balance between accuracy, creativity and clarity to draw readers in.

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Artist and illustrator Lucy Smith helps botanists to identify new species. Usually they request a set of drawings, she says, with a detailed set of requirements.

But Smith, who joined London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, more than 20 years ago, says: “We also feed back to the scientists and say, 'I’ve seen what you’ve asked me to see. But do you know what, I’ve also seen this? Did you know that this flower has this structure.'”

In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, Smith is joined by other artists with experience of science collaborations. David Ibbett, resident composer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says:

“By trying to synthesize these different perspectives on what the science means, we arrive at something new.”

Diana Scarborough, artist-in-residence in bionanotechnolost Ljiljana Fruk’s lab at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that the best collaborations are long term ones, requiring also curiosity and passion. “Looking at their research from a different angle opens up opportunities. If I can make a difference at that point, that will be superb.”

Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is seeking perspectives from science fiction authors on how science can meet societal challenges, ranging from climate change and food security to the disruption caused by artificial intelligence.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.