• 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...
  • The Green (Fluorescent Protein)-Eyed Monster

    Is there a formula for scientific success, or do some scientists simply ‘get lucky’? When in doubt, draw a graph. This is not so much useful advice as a way of life. The pros and cons of various DNA ladders? The best flavour of soup for ten minute incubation breaks? Or the relationship between...
  • Where do science writers get their ideas?

    I’m a week into a month-long placement in a science journalism office made up of real journalists and me – a research scientist who is rapidly learning a new respect for those who write about science in a professional capacity. In the past, I know I’ve Googled ‘where do science journalists get...
  • 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...
  • Running away is not an option, or how plants fight infection

    Like animals, plants can be infected by a range of pathogenic organisms. And, like animals, plants possess an immune system to fight off attacks from pathogens. The plant immune system is analogous to the innate immune system in higher eukaryotes but does not involve mobile immune...
  • Mars needs moms (and not scientists)

    I’ve never, ever seen anything quite like the film 'Mars Needs Moms'. Maybe I should have known in advance that  a Disney animation was unlikely to do a good job of portraying mothers in a realistic manner (their mother-prototype tends to be of the dead variety). But I was surprised by...

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...