Published Wednesday, October 24th, 2007JOHN TRUMBO HERALD STAFF WRITER Eastern Washington’s wines, diverse landscapes and the intellectual horsepower associated with Washington’s universities and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory wowed some of the nation’s science journalists this week.More than 300 of them toured Eastern Washington during a conference in Spokane and the Tri-Cities.
Attendees included award-winning writers from major national newspapers and freelancers just beginning their careers. They spent Monday on the road, touring PNNL in Richland and Palouse Falls.
The 45th annual conference, called New Horizons in Science, was held for the first time in Spokane, where participants heard about subjects as diverse as how DNA research can track the African source of poached elephant ivory, why understanding a baby’s babbling is important to early diagnosis of autism and if it is possible for God and Darwin to coexist, philosophically speaking.
The science was rich, but it was Eastern Washington that impressed.“Most of us probably have been to Seattle, but we had no idea what Spokane and Eastern Washington were like,” said Cristine Russell, president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a former national science writer for the Washington Post.
She and about 160 others peered into the abyss at Palouse Falls on Monday, while PNNL researcher Bruce Bjornstad explained how Ice Age floods gouged and sculpted thousands of square miles from Montana to the Pacific Ocean.
The show-and-tell continued at the Richland laboratory, which Battelle operates for the U.S. Department of Energy. Their visit included a cram course on science at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, where they were introduced to the world of proteins through proteomics, given a snapshot on visualizing massive amounts of information through graphics, told how an electricity infrastructure operations center can monitor demand for power and given a chance to be measured by millimeter wave technology that also can detect contraband.
“We all belong to a community that wants to find out complicated information,” said Joann Rodgers, an award-winning science and medical journalist from New York who oversees media relations at Johns Hopkins.
Holding their conferences at far-flung places is important, too, to get out to where the science is being done, Russell said.
“As science writers, we used to travel a lot and we did a lot of reporting. But now it is the Internet. Hearing a scientist talking and coming to PNNL to learn about their work helps us see why they are excited. This is the personality of science, and how it is done,” Russell said.