Category Archives: Uncategorized

In some long-forgotten undergraduate anthropology course, I learned that our primitive ancestors spent no more than twenty hours a week on sustenance activities. The logical extension was, of course, that our forty-hour-plus work ethic was a sort of modern madness. … Continue reading →

It is a grey, rainy bank holiday weekend here in London so my news is appropriately frivolous. If you inspect the image below, you will see that my local Tesco supermarket in Surrey Quays shopping center is carrying an own-brand … Continue reading →

When I returned to the lab last year, I wasn’t just changing fields of expertise: I was encountering a whole new way of doing science. Instead of tinkering on one gene or pathway, I found myself thrown headlong into the … Continue reading →

For those of you who’ve been away on holiday and are struggling with your first few days back at the bench, I feel your pain, brothers and sisters. It is a truth universally acknowledged that in the wind-down to significant … Continue reading →

Having just touched down in London from SciFoo 2008, I stare, tinged with jetlag, at the blank page and wonder how anyone could adequately summarize a get-together so bizarrely wonderful. Spoiled for choice Dueling, self-organized sessions at the Googleplex in … Continue reading →

The scientific method, it seems, isn’t just a professional ethos. It’s a way of life. I thought about this today as I was fly fishing up a tricky stretch of Chalk Creek, an icy, milky-green stream that cascades downward through … Continue reading →

Sometimes even the most innocuous events can have serious consequences. In a recent post, Henry related a lab nightmare of Hieronymus Boschian proportions which, on waking, made him thank Dawkins that he was no longer a practicing scientist. This, in … Continue reading →

When I think back to what influenced me most to become a scientist, I have never been able to pinpoint a precise moment. Like many children, I captured moths and fireflies in jam jars, played around with chemistry sets, polished … Continue reading →

At the end of this week I am taking the Life in the UK citizenship test as part of my bid to secure indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom. So I spent much of this weekend cramming from … Continue reading →

I was chatting with Richard the other day about his pet protein ZRANB2. Something about the name rang a bell, and sure enough I found that one of its orthologues was present in my own cell morphology screen. I was … Continue reading →