Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive

Yes, the title was a ploy to get your attention. It was People Magazine that named Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson the “Sexiest Astrophysicst Alive” (not sure who wins the Dead title), and that’s only one among many other, more prestigious, honors.

But really we wanted to draw your attention to a very cool audio resource, Lab Out Loud: Science for the Classroom and Beyond, “a podcast, hosted by two science teachers, that discusses science news and science education by interviewing leading scientists, researchers, science writers and other important figures in the field.”

They interviewed Tyson last year about scientific literacy. Here’s a snippet:

The most important feature [of scientific literacy] is an outlook that you bring with you in your daily walk through life. It’s a lens through which you look that affects how you see the world. And the science literacy that can be promoted along those lines shows up in a lot of ways… So science literacy is not the know-it-all who’s fluent in science jargon; science literacy is the person who knows how to question the world around them, and en route to an answer that’s deeper than you would otherwise get.

And if you’re interested in the flip side of science literacy, how scientists communicate science, check out Matt Nisbet’s Framing Science, in which he argues that “more than sixty years of research in the social sciences suggests that something more than just always focusing on improving ‘science literacy’ will be necessary to successfully engage the public.”