Covadonga Martínez de Rioja, at the Madrid Zoo where she did an internship. PHOTO: Biostreet

How do dolphins sleep, how do you measure fever without a thermometer, are cats afraid of water, where does Velcro come from? These are questions that perhaps at some point in our lives we have all asked ourselves. In most cases, knowing the answers to these questions means facing complicated approaches that use a vocabulary that many of us find difficult to understand. And it is precisely this distance between science and the common understanding of people that has pushed Covadonga Martínez de Rioja to create a blog in which she tries to explain, in simple words and without going into very deep details, the answers to everyday questions. The result is Biostreet.

"I am a 5th year Biology student at the University of Navarra, and on some occasion, talking to my flatmates, I realized that they were very interested in everything we learned at class, especially the curiosities of nature. However, when I gave them books explaining why things happened, they quickly lost interest because they found the texts complex to understand and, above all, boring," she says.

"So I decided to create a blog on the Internet in which to tell, with few and simple words, curious or novel things that have to do with science. The good thing about this science is that almost anything you tell that is a little deep is news to almost everyone. So, with respect to news, these are inexhaustible. I usually write about things that occur to me as I go along, I don't have a script, or with proposals that receipt from a professor at School. I classify them in the same blog according to categories (science, fauna, plants, etc.)," the biology student summarizes proudly.

And to get her project up and running, she came up with an attractive name that would serve to stimulate the rapprochement between people and science: biostreet. "It's really about 'street biology', that is, biology for everyone, regardless of the previous knowledge you have about nature or animals.
When writing I try to use simple language and no technicalities or jargon of this science, so that everyone can understand. When I call my grandmother and she tells me she understood, I know I'm doing it right," he concludes.