Laboratory News

Returning to our expert, Jessica Evans, a Member Recruitment Executive at The Royal Society of Chemistry, we revisit the topic of continued professional development, or CPD. In particular, we consider in more detail the benefits to be gained by joining a professional body or member organisation offering structured CPD appropriate to specific scientific fields and at each stage throughout your career.

If you are interested in what the RSC can offer then please do https://rsc.org/members?utm_source=LabNewsandutm_medium=podcastandutm_campaign=lab-news-podcast-Nov-2020 (click here to explore further.)

Derived in 1964 by the social psychologist Erich Fromm, ‘biophilia’ means to love life. Here, architect Robert Hopkins, expands on how the application of biophilic design and sensor-led monitoring systems can aid human resilience in an indoor work environment.

Drug discovery is a tough endeavour - but could nature offer a helping hand? I spoke to Steve Trim, Chief Scientific Officer and Founder of https://venomtech.co.uk (Venomtech) to find out why some of the world's deadliest creatures hold the key to pharmaceutical success.

Taking in poisonous snails, spiders, snakes and arthropods - this episode isn't for the squeamish... but it is an absolute cracker. And if you wanted to have a look at some of the things we speak about, please do watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lku5ksWTHfk (this video) we made a few years back at Steve's lab. I mean, who wouldn't want to see how you anaesthetise a scorpion?

In this year’s Christmas Lectures from the Royal Institution, three scientists from different fields will present a unique ‘user’s guide’ to Planet Earth. They will unravel astonishing global systems and remarkable natural wonders that combine to keep life on Earth alive.

I spoke to each them about their work, the lectures and many other things besides. So come and meet geologist Chris Jackson, physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski and environmental scientist Tara Shine.

The Lectures will be broadcast on BBC Four, at 8pm on Monday 28, Tues 29 and Wed 30 December. After that you can catch them at your leisure https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/watch (here).

If you work in science then you are already highly skilled – very highly skilled. That doesn't necessarily mean there is no room to develop yourself though. It could be that you want to prepare for the next career move, brush-up on the latest technique or even concentrate on 'soft' skills. Whatever it might be, there will always be a demand for highly skilled individuals - and the good news is that if you want to develop yourself, you are not alone.

But where to start - well, there is no better place than professional bodies and learned societies. So, to get to the bottom of what is on offer and how to go about all this I spoke to Jessica Evans and Katie Dryden-Holt from the Royal Society of Chemistry. We touch on why you should be thinking of continuing your professional development, how to get help and why technicians especially should be afforded every opportunity to take advantage of CPD.

If you are interested in what the RSC can offer then please do https://rsc.org/members?utm_source=LabNewsandutm_medium=podcastandutm_campaign=lab-news-podcast-Nov-2020 (click here to explore further.)

I spoke to https://improbable.com/about/people/MarcAbrahams.html (Marc Abrahams), founder of the barmy-but-brilliant https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/ (Ig Nobel Prizes) – which every year honour discoveries which make people laugh and then think.

But don't confuse this with simply poking fun at science - it's clear that Marc ultimately cares deeply about tweaking the publics interest in science, medicine and technology. He just thinks that using humour is the best way to do this... and who could disagree? With former prize winners including the inventor of a bra that turns into a face mask, the team behind work on why wombats do square poo, the medic who figured out which rollercoasters are best for dislodging kidney stones and many, many more – he is clearly on to something.

We spoke, among other things, about the prize itself, why it is important, why science is taught wrongly and why surprise is key to all this.

Its not everyday you get to chat to an Astronaut - especially one who is about to head up on a six-month mission to the ISS.

Kate Rubins is a molecular biologist who was selected by NASA back in 2009 - then during her first mission to the space station she became the first person to sequence DNA in space. I managed to interrupt her busy training schedule – she is due to launch for NASA expedition 64 in a few weeks – to talk space microbiomes, growing cells in microgravity and, well, lots of other fan-boy space questions!

Social distancing is still the main way we have of fending off Covid-19. It has been hard and very costly to the economy, but amazingly we are not the only creatures to do this.

I spoke to Disease Ecologist https://juliabuck.weebly.com/ (Dr Julia Buck), Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, about the idea that however unnatural social distancing may feel to people, it is very much a part of the natural world.

But the way in which animals do this is really fascinating. We also spoke about the instincts within us that lead to social aversions... instincts we would mainly feel as disgust. Julia has published her work on this in Science https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6381/1213 (here).

We also touched on the controversial topic of the link between biodiversity and disease risk.

Its only a bloomin' party episode! And what makes a party really tick? Why music and alcohol of course...

Good thing then that in this episode I am joined by a cognitive neuroscientist come musician who thinks he has found the capacity to detect rhythm in non-human mammals AND a scientific equipment supplier who claim their kit can make gin so good, it'll knock your socks off...

Dr Alexandre Celma-Miralles is a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark deeply interested in how the human brain integrates many different types of stimuli to recognise and react to rhythm. In an effort to find out how deep in our evolution rhythm can be tracked, he decided to find out if rats recognise auditory input using melody or rhythm. And he did it using a rather familiar tune...

His paper on this is here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-020-01739-2 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-020-01739-2)

Duncan Rowe is the product manager for the Milestone range of equipment for the lab supply company https://www.analytix.co.uk (Analytix). He tells us how the company found itself using equipment designed largely for sample-preparation to make gin. But is it any good? There is only one way to find out, so have a listen to find out exactly how drunk I get by the end of the podcast...

Something of a double-header for you in this episode. I spoke to a physicist who managed to create an incredibly rare and exotic state of matter from her living room during lockdown, AND a geneticist who thinks she can strike medical gold using hibernating animals.

Dr Amruta Gadge is a research fellow at the University of Sussex based at the Quantum Systems and Devices Laboratory. She decided not to let lockdown stand in the way of groundbreaking physics as she managed to create a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) - considered to be the fifth state of matter. We spoke about how this was even possible, what a BEC is, if we can make any use of it and we got briefly lost in quantum weirdness...

Dr Katie Grabek is a medical geneticist and computational biologist and is one of the 3 female founders of Fauna Bio. She is an expert in hibernation - which, I was surprised to learn is an incredibly hazardous thing for animals to go through. They have evolved protective mechanisms to stave off heart attacks, metabolic problems and many other issues. So, wonders Katie, can we learn how they do that and use that knowledge to make human medicines?