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…
It brings a whole new meaning to the term ‘lifehack’: scientists can now reprogram an animal’s skin to transform it into other body parts such as blood vessels or nerve tissue. The new technology, Tissue Nanotransfection, allows scientists to turn any living skin into a farm for specialised cells. Tissue Nanotransfection is a huge advance…
Goldfish are popular thanks to, amongst other attractions, being one of the most low maintenance pets available. Less well known, however, is their astounding resilience. For years, researchers have puzzled over how some types of goldfish manage to survive for months in ice-covered lakes and ponds – most vertebrate species would die from the lack…
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…
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…
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,…
Let’s play a little game. Look around you and take note of how much plastic you can see. Is there a water bottle on the side? Perhaps there’s some food packaging littering your floor. Maybe even a polypocket with some dubious notes from a hungover tutorial. Now guess how much of that stuff there is…
