It comes down to telling stories.

One of the problems with computer science is that it isn't that good on tv or radio.

You have to interact with it, play with the concepts, explore the software, work through the ideas, before it begins to make sense.

And so it looks odd on tv.

Always, we do set-up shots of me typing on a keyboard, or looking intently at a screen, or using a smartphone - but this doesn't get to the issues.

People are not interested in screens, or typing, or me using a smartphone - instead, they are interested in the consequences and opportunities offered by these technologies and interactions, and hence the human stories underneath.

Maybe this is why science is hard to portray in general media outlets - science is, mostly, about the objective pursuit of understanding and knowledge (and opportunity and creativity and so on, I'd also argue) - but this almost necessarily dispenses with the personal and human element.

As people, we're interested in other people, and when watching the news, we tend to want to understand the human, personal elements as much as the underlying issues. For example, Greek debt is, essentially, meaningless to us: civil servants in Athens losing pensions is less so; maybe not being to go on holiday there next year would be significant.

Famine is commonplace in the world, and we react to it with minor interest; compare that to the public outcry when a specific cat is thrown into a bin by an identifiable person.

Thus, for science to become more mainstream and understood by the public, we need to find stories to tell.

Whether it's done in the intensely personal manner that the current Radio 4 series "The Life Scientific" adopts, in which an individual scientist is interviewed abou their career trajectory (sounds boring, I know, but is fascinating) or in the more thematic manner of technologies used to help in the war, for example (think of all those dambusting series), or in the lively and irreverent approach taken in Discovery's "Mythbusters" in which films, tv and old wives' tales are reproduced to check their validity, it's the story that matters to the public.

And even for Mythbusters, it majors heavily on the presenters' characters too.

At least, that's what the conventional wisdom tells us, and what I've rationalised here. That's what producers produce, and hence that's what we get, so that's what we watch.

However, I do sometimes wonder if there is a place for a different form of scientific media reporting that is interesting and accessible for all. What sort of story would it be telling?