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…
Regular readers of this column will know that I’ve written fairly often about things going wrong in the lab. Previously, I’ve landed the blame pretty squarely on equipment failures, building crises, management and on more than one occasion, students. But I think anyone who has ever actually worked in a lab knows that these are all just terrible excuses for the real cause of the majority of problems in my research – Me.
Have you read the newspapers recently? If you have somehow avoided them, then you might not know that they are less than cheery about the future. As my vice-chancellor put it in his New Years missive “we are facing a challenging time ahead.”. A better translation in understandable English would Read more…