February 2015
Land - spare or share?
The debate on what is better for the environment and by extension many ecosystem services, high intensity conventional farming using large amounts of fertiliser and pesticides on mostly homogenous areas or low intensity possibly organic farming in a heterogeneous landscape seems to be a no-brainer. High intensity farms are pressing into natural habitats, pesticides are […]
Badgery Fieldwork
One of the best things about my PhD has got to be the fieldwork. My project involves analysing the GPS data of a population of badgers to find out where they forage, how big their territories are, who lives with whom and how they disperse. This means putting GPS collars on them twice a year. […]
Ostrich Knees
Dear Dr. Jeal, Why is it that when a mammal kneels down its legs bend forwards, but when an ostrich bends down its legs bend back? - Junior Sophs. The question you ask is quite curious, but I don't think you're on the right track, Saying "knees of a mammal bend forward, while knees of […]
The importance of being Earnest - The case of climate change
In Oscar Wilde’s comedy “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Cecily and Gwendolen want to marry a man named Ernest simply because of the name’s connotations. They are so fixated on the name that they would not consider marrying a man who was not named Ernest. The name, sounding like “earnest”, shows uprightness, inspires “absolute confidence”, […]
Trip to the tropics: rising water in the Rift Valley lakes
We drive out of the compound just after dawn; a convoy of four vans full of final year science students and staff. We heard lions calling beyond the fence last night, and we haven’t gone 500 meters before we see them: two males strolling off to the left. Within hours, we will have seen herds […]
Stress Busting
Inspired by recent reports of rising mental health problems in academia plus an acute increase in stress around the department this summer when many PhD students were writing up, we decided to run a "Dealing with stress" seminar at NERD club (ironically this session was canceled previously due to the PIs being "too stressed" to […]
The more the better?
These days I’m writing up the discussion of my sensitivity analysis paper on missing data using the Total Evidence method (more about it here and here). One evident opening for proposing future improvement on my analysis is the obvious “let’s-do-it-again-with-more-data” one... But a recent Science paper by Jarvis et al made me reconsider that. Is […]
War of the Words - The Conflict between Science and Journalism, Part 1
Science journalists have a vital role to play in modern society, typically acting as gatekeepers of scientific knowledge for the public. According to the sociologist Peter Conrad (1999), “Science journalism is an increasingly important wellspring of public understanding of science.” Science journalists are an interesting subset of journalists in that they depend on press releases […]