A few months ago, I had the opportunity to ask Al Gore about the characteristics of the scientists who had been most effective in teaching him about complex science. I recently posed the same question to George Monbiot. Monbiot writes a column on the environment for the Gaurdian and recently authored a book about what it would look like to restore big animals to the environment. More about his answer in a moment...

                                                                     A wordcloud based on the most frequent words associated with the conference on                                                                      Twitter. I sampled 1500 tweets and show only the terms occurring >20 times. Thanks to                                                                                    the "twitteR" and "wordcloud" packages in R. 

This all occurred in the context of a three day conference on megafauna (big animals) that was convened at University of Oxford. The talks imagined a world full of mammoths, lions, bears, and bison. I am, decidedly, not an expert in anything that has to do with animals. But I also recognize that our planet looks the way it does (and may have looked very different in the not so distant past) because of big animals. I think that this knowledge informs my research. Perhaps of equal interest to me is the power of big animals to capture the public imagination. The idea of a world with woolly mammoths draws people to zoos, parks, museums, movies, and books. I think that we are drawn to the idea of a time when humans were not the most dangerous animal on the planet and the conservation implications are interesting to consider. 

Monbiot came to Oxford's Natural History Museum to provide a keynote for the conference on why we ought to consider putting big animals back where they belong. He is a masterful speaker. He opens with great energy. He is self-deprecating. He uses the stage well. And he has a way with the words that was the talk of the crowd afterwards. I appreciate the role that he plays in thinking about how to reconnect us with nature.  

And as for the most compelling aspect of Monbiot's response to my question about effective science communication? It was the idea of creating an arc in the story that leaves the audience in suspense, so that they wait just a little for the punchline. 

Peel off the bark of your nearest pine tree, fasten it to a source of dirty water, and wait for the clean water to come out the other side. 

Providing a simple, cheap, and sustainable method for filtering dirty water is that simple, according to a new study published this week in PLoS ONE. The study demonstrates that a 2 cm long piece of branch with a 1 cm diameter can filter 99.9% of the E. coli out of a water sample and that each segment could be effective for a few liters a day. Not surprisingly, it needs to be fresh branch wood, not dried.

The plant's xylem, and more specifically the torus-margo pit membrane,  is responsible for all of the action. Xylem is the series of tubes that water travels through in a branch --- torus-margo pits are tiny closable valves between tubes. The interesting thing about the torus-margo pits is that they have the appearance of a spiderweb, with a pancake in the middle (the best description I can come up with...), and that spiderweb is where all of the E. coli is captured. Torus-margo pits serve a vital function in the plants, when there is not enough water the spiderweb flexes so that the pancake presses against the connection between the two tubes, effectively isolating one (empty) tube from another (full tube). It's very cool to consider another possible function, albeit totally unintended, for this anatomical feature. 

Boutilier et al. 2014. Water filtration using plant xylem. PLoS ONE 9(2): e89934.