Features
Internship at the Smithsonian: Blog 5
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…
Internship at POST: Blog 3
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…
Internship at the Smithsonian: Blog 4
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…
Internship at École Normale Supérieure: Blog 1
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…
Internship at the Smithsonian: Blog 3
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…
My Micro-Internship at the Curiosity Box: Bulk Buying Marshmallows and Inspiring Children
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…
Internship at the Smithsonian: Blog 2
Blog 2: The Taxonomist’s Work When people imagine science, they imagine how it is in the movies. Men in white lab coats, peering into the fabric of reality, one breakthrough coming after another as if they were results on election night. The truth of science is much more pedestrian—whether it is physicists who pore over…
Internship at the Smithsonian: Blog 1
Blog 1: The Taxonomist’s Office To an outsider, the most shocking thing about a scientist’s office is its poverty. In nearly every other field that is highly respected in modern bourgeois society, whether it is law, finance, medicine, or even accounting, the upper echelons of the profession promise a comfortable office, with modern designed furniture,…
Internship at POST: Blog 2
Blog 2: Engaging with Parliament During my 3-month internship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), I was responsible for researching and producing a Parliamentary briefing document, called a “POSTnote” about a Biology and Health topic (see Blog Post 1). POST select science topics to research that currently are, or soon will be,…
Roman Concrete: To go forward is to look back
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but their concrete can withstand the ages: around 2 millennia to be precise. There are many intriguing stories of ancient materials with fascinating properties but long-forgotten methods of production, like Damascus steel, the supposed chromium plated blades of the terracotta army, and Roman concrete. However, more light has been shed…