Laboratory News

"I didn't realise that it is basically impossible to stop a turtle physically... it just rolls you over"

Not, it's true to say, what I expected to hear from an ecologist who has spent the last few years finding a surprising amount of interesting life living on the shells of turtles. But, it turns out, there are a lot of unexpected turns in the life of a meiofauna ecologist - from working in paradise to back-breaking hard work and from nematode paradoxes to biological calling cards...

Not content with bending my mind with his work on intelligent alien civilisations - Astrophysicist Professor Christopher Conselice went on to talk about his main work on galactic formation and galactic mergers...

Just how many intelligent civilisations, if you were pressed, would you say exist - or indeed existed – in our galaxy? It may be more than you think. Professor Christopher Conselice thinks he knows how many there should be, and has even put a number in it.

This was a genuinely fascinating conversation which left me in awe and also slightly disappointed at the chances we might have of extra-terrestrial communication.

Christopher's paper is here:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab8225 (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab8225)

There is, of course, so much coverage of Covid-19 at the moment I wasn't sure if it was worth yet another conversation... boy, was I wrong.

The brilliant Dr Sarah Pitt - Virologist at the University of Brighton and Chief Virology Examiner at the Institute of Biomedical Science – has so much to say on our response to this. The testing, the vaccine, the immune response and the biology of the virus itself - this was one of the more eye-opening conversations I have had in 15 years of science journalism. Have we got track and trace all wrong? Will the virus evolve to be more benign over time? Has the PCR testing been reliable? Will there ever be a vaccine?

I'd definitely suggest listening to the whole thing, but if you want to skip to a point of interest quickly there is a time stamp of the topics we cover below.

Time stamp:

Dr Sarah Pitt interview starts - 5.30

Our immune response - 8.30

Setting up testing superlabs - 10.50

Is regional difference in diagnosis down to different PCR tests? - 13.00

Has this damaged sciences' reputation? - 16.00

Track and trace, have we got it wrong? - 19.00

Vaccines - how long will it take? - 20.25

Is coronavirus now endemic in humans? - 23.20

Will it evolve to be less deadly? - 25.00

Links:

Do you know what happens to your sample IBMS https://www.ibms.org/do-you-know-what-happens-to-your-sample/ (videos)

Dr Sarah Pitt's article about https://www.labnews.co.uk/article/2030503/coronavirus-is-it-just-a-type-of-flu (SARS-Cov2 and influenza virus)

How do you record one of the most notoriously shy animals on the planet? Accidentally...

Geophysicist Evgeny Podolskiy was busying himself recording the sounds of glaciers in Greenland when he suddenly realised that he had stumbled on the summering grounds of a population of narwhals.

So began an odyssey in sound featuring social calls, echolocation and hunting clicks - and, amazingly, a local Inuit hunting expedition.