Vanessa Woods (born 1977) is an Australians science writer, author and journalist, and is the main /New Zealand feature writer for the Discovery Channel.[
] A graduate of the Australian National University with a Master's degree in Science Communication,[
][
] Her mother is of Chinese people descent.[A. Pung, Growing Up Asian in Australia. Black Inc., 2008. .]
She is the author of Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo and It's Every Monkey for Themselves: A True Story of Sex, Love, and Lies in the Jungle.
Career
Working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, she spent 10 months in the Democratic Republic of Congo studying bonobos, a species of
great ape as genetically close to humans as the Common Chimpanzee, in order to make comparisons between the behaviors of humankind and ape.
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She wrote an in-depth report on Africanized bee encountered during her studies in Costa Rica,[
] and has also written a piece on the yearly cherry blossom experience in Kyoto, Japan.[
]
Partial bibliography
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It's Every Monkey for Themselves – (2007) Allen & Unwin,
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Bonobo Handshake – (2010) Penguin Books/Gotham Books,
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Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, "Survival of the Friendliest: Natural selection for hypersocial traits enabled Earth's apex species to best Neandertals and other competitors", Scientific American, vol. 323, no. 2 (August 2020), pp. 58–63.
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Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, "Survival of the Friendliest. Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity". New York: Random House 2020. ISBN 978-0-39959-068-9
Children's books
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It's True! There Are Bugs in Your Bed (2004)
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It's True! Space turns you into spaghetti (2006)
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It's True! Pirates ate rats (2007)
Awards and recognition
In 2003, Woods won the Australasian Science Award for journalism.
In 2007, her children's book on space,
It's True! Space turns you into spaghetti, was named an Acclaimed Book by the UK
Royal Society and shortlisted for the Royal Society's Junior Science Book Prize.
External links
