Extinction is Forever

In preparing for the start of second year, I (Kali) spent part of my time in completing various MOOCs - free, online courses.  This was both to increase knowledge and to get back into the habit of studying regularly before the semester actually starts. Below are my notes from the Coursera online course How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper , designed by Phd students from the French University,  École Polytechnique .  The course is presented in English and  is split over four weeks, with approximately 2 hours work expected for each week.  You can access the entire thing at any time, so you could do it in a day if you wanted to.  There is a paid option, if you want to get a certificate of completion, but that's definitely not necessary.  While MOOCs are useful for building up skills, they can vary so much in what it takes to earn a grade and the general quality that they don't indicate anything very useful when you put them on a CV .  It's much more useful to learn a

Or, how I accidentally became a member of a research group. Back in Spring, I signed up for the Manchester Gold Mentoring which is there for students to improve their CVs. I was assigned Samuel Purkiss as a mentor who is a MPhil student in Reinmar Hager's lab and he offered me and the other mentee (Marco) the opportunity to gain some lab experience by helping him with the work that he was doing with Mhd.Shadi Khudr (the lab's postdoc who designed the experiments) on aphids and daphnia. Initially, I was a bit reluctant to be in the building long or to do work on the group's computers but after some time I got used to it but throughout the summer I grew more comfortable and by July, I started coming in every day, as early as possible. I also have my own little desk space now.  It has a folder where I collect data and papers, a book about Epigenetics that I bought but wanted to leave available to everyone. some blank paper and other stationary and most importantly the c

An Introduction In this post, I'm going to talk about an experiment we performed to examine alleles of the TAS2R38 gene.  I also want to talk about the results I expected, why I expected them, and why this bias was incorrect.  For that, I need to begin by talking about race. On a genetic level, race doesn't exist, or, at least, it's very, very different to how it works on a social level.  People from Africa are the most racially diverse, and differ from each other more than, say, someone from England and someone from India do, on a genetic level.  That's due to the founder effect; only a small portion of the population of Africa left to populate the rest of the world, representing only a tiny fraction of humanity's genome.  The DNA of human beings, in general, is really not all that different.  For more info, take a look at  A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived  by Adam Rutherford . And yet, even knowing that, it made me happy that the author is the s

This is a guest post by John Banks, a first year law student at the University of Manchester, with edits from Kali.  John was so excited by the concept of solar sails that he wouldn't shut up until we let him write this post. We call this the power of science. Science! Lawyers and Engineers In February, I, an aspiring law student, attended an event hosted by ReThinkX at CityLabs in Manchester. This was focused on the advances required in medicine to address problems associated with extended periods of space travel on the human body. I already know what you are thinking; ‘How did a plucky law student like myself end up at an event like this?’ It’s a compelling tale; with an infinitely witty main character, a dialogue tormented by puns, and a nostalgic soundtrack. A story for another time. My curiosity was captured by Colin McInnes, MBE, Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Glasgow . From his speech stems my inspiration for this post, for Professor

Kali's Review I first heard of The Martian  on, of all places, Martin Lewis' blog .  Martin Lewis the UK's Money Saving Expert , and one of the reasons he recommended the book was that, at the time, it was 77p, and also a "gripping page-turner" that he couldn't put down. I didn't buy it at the time.  I was a moron.  Blame my large and unwieldy unread pile, which, in 2013, was around 250 books high. I finally got my hands on The Martian sometime early in 2016.  I got it as an audiobook and listened to it while I was walking around trying to get enough steps with my Vivofit and playing Six to Start's The Walk (an iPhone game which I also recommend, along with their  Zombies, Run! ).  I got it in February, and then listened to it again in May, while completing a twelve-mile walk around Dudley . That last bit isn't quite true; I fully intended to spend the twelve miles listening to it, but I actually got adopted by an amazing little Ru

Who was Terry Pratchett? Sir Terry Pratchett died two years ago today , at the age of sixty-six.  He had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease eight years before and campaigned for the right to assisted suicide and Alzheimer's awareness.   Over £40,000 was raised for The Research Institute for the Care of Older People following the announcement of his death.    He was Britain's best-selling author, only temporarily eclipsed by JK Rowling. "The space between the young readers eyeballs and the printed page is a holy place and officialdom should trample all over it at their peril." Sir Pterry's - and I'll explain that nickname in a moment - first novel was The Carpet People , published in 1971, when he was 23.  The first of his novels that I read was Only You Can Save Mankind , when I was ten-years-old, in 1999.  A year or two later I read the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic , and Jingo , the latter purely because it was

Women have always fought. That's not an original line; it's from the award-winning essay by Kameron Hurley  which describes the surprising fact that women have always fought . Here's a quote from the essay, which I highly recommend reading in full; "...when we talk about “people” we don’t really mean “men and women.” We mean “people and female people.”  We talk about “American Novelists” and “ American Women Novelists .” We talk about “Teenage Coders” and “ Lady Teenage Coders .” And when we talk about war, we talk about soldiers and female soldiers.   Because this is the way we talk, when we talk about history and use the word “soldiers” it immediately erases any women doing the fighting. Which is it comes as no surprise that the folks excavating Viking graves didn’t bother to check whether the graves they dug up were male or female. They were graves with swords in them. Swords are for soldiers.  Soldiers are men.   It was years before they  thought to

This post by Lauren Goodfellow, with some edits  by Alice De Sampiao Kalkuhl. Every young person, no matter what it is they want in life, will look for a role model. It is sometimes difficult for women, looking to pursue a career in a male-dominated field, to find a role model that they can connect with enough to truly believe they can one day be like their hero. Science is one of those fields that can be intimidating for young women, but people like Nancy Rothwell are slowly breaking down the barriers for other women to follow in their footsteps. Rothwell succeeded not only in the scientific field, but also within academia which makes her a role model above and beyond normal. Dame Nancy Rothwell Each year, International Women's Day celebrates the amazing achievements of women from around the world, bringing their enormous contributions to society to the centre stage. To commemorate this great day, The University of Manchester and WISE (Women In Science and Engineering) o

Notes on a talk delivered by Dr Rochelle Velho, Academic Clinical Fellow , with the  UK Space Environments Association , at Final Frontiers in Healthcare, organised by  ReThinkX  at Citylabs, Manchester, 16th February 2017.   Welcome back! This week, we're going to talk about Dr Rochelle Velho and her Mars Analogue missions. via GIPHY Tele-Medicine  Tele-medicine is the practice of viewing vital signs, and, if necessary, giving advice and information based on those signs, from a distance.  It's what you need to do in space; often, astronauts are working independently, very far away from help, in dangerous conditions. This also has applications on earth, both in working with patients in dangerous situations, and simply in the fact that studying bodies in space can allow us to better understand patients on earth. An important question for space travel is...should a doctor go along?  Astronauts are some of the strongest, smartest people on the planet, b