Humans are an inventive bunch. We’re not long out of the trees and our brains have already given us literature, art and the sciences. We are a creative species that constantly seeks to invent, create and problem solve. However, as smart as we are Nature is often one of the Read more…
There have been many changes since the start of the COVID crisis. For one the frequency of articles that start “something something COVID crisis” have sky rocketed and I’ve never started so many emails with “I hope you are well” and meant it with genuine concern. But one change was Read more…
Experiments are complicated and difficult things. Experiments are amazing sources of unpredictable chaos no matter how simple they seem. In some ways, this unpredictable complexity is a good thing. Many of those researchers and scientists reading this article have based entire careers on the fact that what they do is complicated Read more…
Coffee shops are the place to do work. I can say with the certainty of someone making up a fact that every Costa an Starbucks right now has at least one author writing a novella about a troubled young teenager trying to understand their place in a society that hates Read more…
Starting a new job is an exciting, terrifying and exhausting experience. You’ll almost certainly have a giant volume of new scientific material to absorb as well as countless names to fail at remembering and office fridge etiquette to understand. But before you get to any of those problems you still Read more…
When I was about 13 I started at a new school. Starting a school aged 13 you don’t get a lot of choices about what you get to do, which is fair as I remember me aged 13 and I wouldn’t have trusted me to decide on a sandwich filling, Read more…
I don’t get out much – both socially, and from a research perspective. The first one is mostly due to the ridiculous hours required by the second one. But either way, I spend more time inside basking in the glow of fluorescent tubes (or tubes of fancy, expensive energy saving Read more…
When I was in school, I was often told that I had to practice essay writing because I’ll need to do it later in life. When I was about 10, it honestly sounded like the sort of thing your teachers tell you so that you’ll actually keep doing something that Read more…
Research tends to breed/attract people who are very subject-focused. The nature of the job tends to push people into narrowing their expertise down to a very finely focused point. This is in someways unavoidable and in fact quite required to push the boundaries of your chosen researcher area, or at least Read more…
Scientific progress is a tricky thing. Despite what you might think, the direction of science is not always forwards – sometimes as a species we can unlearn things which then take us hundreds of years to re-discover. Sometimes this is simply from ideas not being publicised enough and it slips Read more…