• Finding Beauty in the Macabre

    In a small chapel just outside Prague, a chandelier made from every bone in the human body hangs from a garland of skulls like the world's creepiest wind-chime. Nearby, a coat of arms features an almost comical bone bird—its wings a human hand and its neck a gnarled vertebrae—that pecks at a...
  • Wasted Time Isn’t Always Wasted Time

    The other day I commented to the father of my child that having a baby is a little bit like going to prison. Not the ‘nice’ sort of prison where they let you do Open University courses and try to make you a better person. A Victorian-style prison where the inmates are forced to turn a crank...
  • Thirteen things about doing a science PhD...

    ...that I wish I could tell my younger self: 1. It’s not going to be easy or, at least, it won’t feel easy. At some point, you’re probably going to start doubting everything about yourself, from your ability to generate high-quality data to whether that old lady on the bus moved seats because...
  • Refocusing the Microscope

    I grew up staring out at the stars through my parents’ antique telescopes; marvelling at the tiny pinpricks of twinkling light and how, on a clear night, the Milky Way streaked across the sky. There are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and more than 1,000 billion galaxies in the...
  • Gut Inflammation and Antibiotic Resistance

    A Salmonella infection has some very obvious and unpleasant effects on the unfortunate person who failed to wash or cook their food correctly. But it also messes with the bacteria that live in our guts, and that’s not a good thing when it comes to the emergence of new pathogens...
  • Getting our heads around African sleeping sickness

    African sleeping sickness is one of those scary diseases that seems kind of alien to anyone living in the Western world but which is a real threat to those living in sub-Sahara Africa, causing around 50,000 cases each year. The disease gets its name from the most recognisable symptom—a disruption...

Wednesday, 26 April 2017

I have a troubled relationship with Twitter. It’s an unredeemable hate sort of thing. I’m generally an inane mix of angry opinion and low self-esteem so, in theory, we’re perfect for each other. I just don’t feel it, though. I had a quick look for online videos in the same vein of the YouTube self-hypnosis that resolutely failed...

Tuesday, 18 April 2017

If infectious diseases were monsters, what would they look like? I imagine malaria would be a terrible mosquito-like creature made of bones, with a wickedly sharp proboscis and a throbbing gut of fiery red blood. Diarrhoeal disease would rise from a swamp of sewage, grinning with its skull’s jaw as it handed out cups of contaminated...

Wednesday, 5 April 2017

I grew up staring out at the stars through my parents’ antique telescopes; marvelling at the tiny pinpricks of twinkling light and how, on a clear night, the Milky Way streaked across the sky. There are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and more than 1,000 billion galaxies in the universe. How many of them, I used to...