A couple of weeks ago there was an article in Nature entitled "Does Gender Matter?" (Vol 442, pp133-136). It was written by Ben Barres, who was previously Barbara Barres. He writes about gender bias in science and has a few anecdotes of his experience as first a female and then a male scientist. It has been picked up by a lot of the American ( Read more... )

So, new nuclear power stations are on the horizon again. Whatever about the way the decision was made (executive vs. legislature and all that), I think it's generally a sensible decision for the position we currently find ourselves in. I've said it before and will, no doubt, say it again, but in a toss-up between reducing power consumption and ( Read more... )

So, I was searching the web for places from which I could replenish my stock of copper sulphate. (Chemistry sets are cool, but they don't supply you with nearly sufficient quantities of chemicals.) It seems that CuSO4 is used in gardening so I thought I'd try a search based on that and came up with this page. It's an article from the Guardian ( Read more... )

There's a story in the education section on BBC News at the moment reporting on the Royal Society survey that found that most scientists don't think outreach work (other than in industry) is important and anyway they're too busy trying to get funding for their department ( Read more... )

A colleague of mine was taking photos of me doing a training session this afternoon. (Next week is Patient Safety Week, we needed some images for a poster.) Amongst them, I came across this one. Now, I know I use my hands a lot when I'm talking, but I just can't imagine what I was doing to end up waving one of them in the air like this. I'm ( Read more... )

I don't know whether I'm coming or going at the moment. In the last 12 days I've visited Dublin, Wexford, London, Cardiff, Bath, Abingdon, Harwell and Melton. And I've had to be up at stupid times far too often, including one 0630 flight. Looking forward to some relative normality next week ( Read more... )

Had me mocking the TV again. Yes, pretty much anything operated by mains electricity will emit radiation. No, it will generally not be ionising radiation. Even the x-rays that are emitted from CRTs (old style televisions and computer monitors) will barely trigger the most sensitive types of radiation detectors we use in hospitals. I'm going to ( Read more... )

I was on a training course for Monte Carlo modelling yesterday. One of the most interesting courses I've been on. Some excellent speakers with presentations that were well-tailored to the audience. The first talk covered the concept behind Monte Carlo and a brief bit of history, including an example of how you can use statistics to determine pi ( Read more... )

Sumatriptan is now available over the counter in the UK. I read quite a bit of the literature on this while I was doing my PhD and the triptans seem to be a bit of a wonder drug for the treatment of migraine. They work to reduce the blood vessels of the brain back to their normal size and stop the migraine itself rather than trying to suppress ( Read more... )

I knew there was a reason why I didn't go to hairdressers, but it had been about five years since the last time and my resolution had wavered. Particularly when presented with a £10 off voucher. Now, I expected to be unhappy with the finishing/styling/whatever the bit after the cutting is called, but I wasn't prepared to look like Cousin It. ( Read more... )