Having recently started my PhD on the conservation management of elasmobranch (sharks, rays and skates) populations, I embarked on my first fieldwork season to Ecuador. Many people, including most of my friends, asked me if this involved swimming with sharks- and as glamorous as that sounded – their faces dropped when I inevitably told them that I went to fish markets in Ecuador to collect samples from dead sharks. Perhaps not as exciting as they had hoped.
Ever since the first demonstration of gene editing technologies, the scientific community has been abuzz with debate and speculation about their potential applications. But rather less well known may be the parallel legal battles over how these powerful new methods should be regulated, one of which recently found its way to the European Union’s highest court, the CJEU.
f you work in a lab, you will know that feeling when your supervisor says ‘you have it easy, it was never like this back when I was doing lab work…’ To be fair to our supervisors, times have changed and with it, a lot of experiments are easier. The crazy thing is, these changes really have happened overnight.
If you’re currently looking for a PhD project or if you’re in your first year, I hope this blog can give you some guidance and useful advice on what to expect during your journey as a PhD student.
Our activity titled “Decoding and Designing”, which was part of the Midlothian science festival, brought the concepts of Bioinformatics and Synthetic Biology to kids. Those are two abstract terms which sound difficult to comprehend and communicate.
With Wordpress for bloggers, Instagram for photographers, YouTube for vloggers, and the world’s loudest-ever microphone in Twitter, there’s quite simply never been a better or easier time to get started in science communication. Not only are there a whole variety of different ways of getting your message out, but social media has also democratised the process. You don’t need to be a professional communicator or even an expert user, you just have to want to give it a try: this is the age of the empowered amateur. The range of technologies also means that…
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. While TB may seem to be a disease of the past in developed nations, it still kills 1.7 million people annually. Therefore, despite the advances in TB prevention and treatment, complete eradication of this deadly disease is still a global concern.
