Extinction is Forever

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...

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 Engi...

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, s...