I love bacon so much. And burgers, and chicken nuggets. So as you can imagine, becoming a vegetarian wasn’t something that I’d previously considered. But I’ve now been veggie for 3 weeks and counting, because it felt like something I should do. Globally, the livestock industry churns out more greenhouse gases than transport1, and as…
“How you feelin, babe? Log it in Eve and watch the magic happen”. This is the notification I receive every morning. At 9am, as another day of lectures awaits me, I’m offended by this cheerful tone. I also don’t enjoy being called “babe”, not by a significant other, and definitely not by an app. But…
Blog 4: Writing the POSTnote The aim of a POSTnote is to inform Parliamentarians (MPs and Peers) about an important science topic that is relevant to current or upcoming policy decisions. It is also must be concise (only 4 pages!) as MPs and Peers have to a huge amount of different topics to get through….
Blog 2: A Summer of Science in Paris Coming to the end of my two-month internship, I’ve been reflecting upon what exactly I’ve learnt from it. Of course, there are the laboratory techniques themselves: I can now state on my CV that I have experience with fancy-sounding things like immunohistochemistry and pyrosequencing, which is nice….
Blog 5: The Taxonomist’s Assistants So far in these posts I have practically maintained a fiction that the entirety of research is done by curators and students—however, this gives a great disservice to a class of scientist just as large, if not larger, than the curators and researchers themselves. At the Smithsonian they are called…
Blog 3: Working in Parliament The three months during which I was interning at POST were a particularly chaotic time for UK politics. When I arrived in February 2017, people were still reeling from the results of the BREXIT vote, and that was reflected in the type of work that was being carried out by…
Blog 4: The Taxonomist’s Psyche You might wonder, with fair justification, just what sort of madness drives someone into systematics, let alone molluscan systematics. After all, it is a field that offers no great financial rewards, nor any chance to enter the history books. Systematics as a field is far too unscientific to merit any…
Blog 1: The Secret Lives of Diatoms This summer I’m lucky enough to be interning in a laboratory based at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The group research diatoms, which are microscopic, single-celled phytoplankton. Despite being unfamiliar to most people, they are ubiquitous in the earth’s aquatic habitats, and in contrast to their humble…
Blog 3: The Taxonomist’s Tales Not every second of the work day is spent at work; indeed there are often stretches of time where there is nothing to do except talk. Whether during lunchtime, or as you leave work, or even while preparing specimens, there is actually a lot of downtime while working in scientific…
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) is needed and, more importantly, STEM is wanted. The former is obvious, because many countries like the United Kingdom or the United States have been taking action in promoting these subjects and improving the teaching quality in need of more people studying STEM since 2015. The latter has been…
