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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

Notes on a talk delivered by Dr Daniel Grant, Aerospace Development Director for CASE medicine at Final Frontiers in Healthcare, organised by ReThinkX at Citylabs, Manchester, 16th February 2017.   Dr Grant began by explaining that, in space travel, micro-gravity is the largest factor effecting human health, particularly if people plan on coming back to earth.  Note that there is gravity in space – it's just coming, in varying amounts, from every single large mass, none of which are close enough to stick you to the floor the way earth does.  When in orbit, you're actually in free-fall, which isn't really much better.  Human bodies experience a fluid shift, with blood pooling in the head. The blood pressure set point also changes, causing problems when they come back home.  Even after as little as two weeks in space, astronauts struggle to stand up for ten minutes at a time. Dizziness Your balance is affected, and to understand this, we'll first ne...