Author Archives: Athene Donald

An Iconoclastic and Flirtatious Master

I am currently reading Patricia Fara‘s recent book Science: A Four Thousand Year History which cuts an interesting swathe through different cultures, different individuals and different discoveries (sometimes even the same discovery in different places). It is not your average … Continue reading

Posted in Book Review, History of Science | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on An Iconoclastic and Flirtatious Master

Hacked Off

Can one ever escape the workaday grind, successfully avoid slipping over the edge to descend into the chaos I wrote about a little while ago or even manage merely to keep one’s cool despite provocation? There are so many things … Continue reading

Posted in Science Culture, social media | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Prejudice Go Down

I wasn’t really paying attention to the radio. I was busy cooking, but it sounded to me as if the question Clive Anderson asked the film-maker Andrea Calderwood on Saturday’s episode of Loose Ends amounted to ‘how come a nice … Continue reading

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Stuff of Brains

That migraine I was waiting for finally struck this week. Amazingly it didn’t throw my life into disarray, because it hit me during a week I was supposed to be having ‘off’. Consequently it only spoiled a day of relaxation, … Continue reading

Posted in Neuroscience | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Science and Nerves at the BBC

Last week you would have found three professors gathered nervously together in the depths of (Old) Broadcasting House waiting for the studio to be ready to air the week’s broadcast of In Our Time. Three professors who had never met … Continue reading

Posted in Communicating Science, Education | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments