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Review: Heart of the Original

Posted on 29 March 2016 by Stephen

Steve Aylett’s short book on originality, creativity and individuality may conform externally to the rectilinear format of most other books but is otherwise highly elliptical. I found it maddening.

Heart of the Original
Heart of the Original – Alan Moore loved it. 

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Manifesto for Change

Posted on 28 March 2016 by Athene Donald

‘Science needs women’ proclaims the L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science awards tagline. For the last 18 years the pairing has been awarding five laureates to women from different geographical regions around the world each year to celebrate (and publicise) their success. With L’Oreal’s effective PR machine, they are able to reach mainstream media in Continue reading →

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Pending

Posted on 27 March 2016 by Steve Caplan

lab-fix2

First, I must say that I feel more than a tinge of guilt at my lack of ‘productivity’ on the OT site in recent months. I would like to maintain that it’s my hectic schedule, science, grants, teaching, papers, reviewing–and outside the lab, the recent election to the American Society for Cell Biology’s Public Policy Co Continue reading →

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Budapest

Posted on 24 March 2016 by Erika Cule
Everything the light touches

Everything the light touches

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Who Do You Care For?

Posted on 21 March 2016 by Athene Donald

The challenges associated with parental responsibilities are obvious and much-discussed. For many scientists they can seem overwhelming, limiting and sometimes ultimately career-destroying. The recent booklet published by the Royal Society (Parent Carer Scientist) that I wrote about before, attempts to bust some of the myths and show the many diffe Continue reading →

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Review: The Many Worlds of Albie Bright

Posted on 19 March 2016 by Stephen

After publishing my round-up of the books I’d read in 2015, the author Christopher Edge got in touch via twitter to offer a review copy of his new book, The Many Worlds of Albie Bright.

It’s a short novel for children which has an ambitious amount of science threaded into the plot. At the beginning of the story young Albie has just lost his physici Continue reading →

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Metavation

Posted on 17 March 2016 by Frank Norman

I first came to work at NIMR Mill Hill back in the blessed innocent times of 1989. After a few months my boss sent me on a course about ‘Motivation’. The course was organised by Aslib, and was held at their grand HQ in London’s Belgrave Square. It was good to be out of the office dor a day, having some thinking time with a group of other librarians Continue reading →

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How Not to Chair a Committee

Posted on 15 March 2016 by Athene Donald

Whether as a student or a professor (or indeed at any level in between) I would suspect there isn’t a reader of this blog who hasn’t had to sit through a meeting of some type or other where the Chair has intensely irritated them somehow. There are of course a huge variety of ways to fail to chair a committee well. What follows are some descriptions Continue reading →

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Dare to Dream: Parent Carer Scientist

Posted on 10 March 2016 by Athene Donald

This post first appeared here on the Huffington Post on 9th March 2016.

‘Science Needs Women’ says L’Oreal’s tagline succinctly for its For Women in Science Campaign. Science needs women to ensure the best science is done by the most talented individuals, whatever their gender. It needs women to be creative and to think late Continue reading →

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In which fiction infiltrates science

Posted on 9 March 2016 by Jennifer Rohn

Two years ago I was honored to have been one of the recipients of the Suffrage Science award. Launched in 2011 by the Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre, this program involves heirloom jewelry, originally designed by art students at Central St Martins College, being passed down from one ‘generation’ of women to the next.

As I wrote a Continue reading →

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