European science conversations
by the community, for the community
Many of our daily products are made from pollutant materials, which have proven to be extremely difficult to recycle. Recently, there have been a number of high profile campaigns to raise awareness about the global plastic waste crisis. Specifically to raise awareness of single-use plastics (microbeads, packaging, bags, disposable products etc.), which make up approximately 40% of the now more than 448 million tons of plastic produced every year. In an effort to do their bit to help, some biotechnological companies within the healthcare sector have focused their efforts on the search for alternative materials to fabricate diagnostics products. Paper has emerged as a possibility, but is it actually a real option for the market? Read more [...]
Greek educational system is downgrading Natural Sciences as a whole against any scientific and pedagogical argumentation and international practice. Read more [...]
There is innovation in the podcast world. The new audio and digital media drama series Blood Culture is case in point, as it goes beyond traditional borders of podcasting by encompassing website, film, live discussion with scientific experts and even a SMS text game. Find out from the mouth of his producer, Lance Dann how this bio-medical thriller series came about. Initially centred on the concept of blood research, it explores people's anxieties of the marketisation of the human body, exploitation of Millennial interns and the pervasiveness of corporate control in our everyday lives. The series results from a combination between creative practice and science, with experts and scientists contributing throughout the development of the narrative. Read more [...]
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Our food security may be controlled by a small group, fewer than 10 very large corporations. They decide prices, varieties, conditions of growth. SEEDcontrol is a project born from the partnership between formicablu, an Italian science communication agency, and Oxpeckers, a South African Center for Investigative Environmental Journalism. Specifically, the project has been designed by Elisabetta Tola and Fiona Macleod. Read more [...]
In April of this year the world’s first three-parent baby was born and is reported to be healthy. This is a huge milestone in mitochondrial therapy, a year after the procedure was legalised in the UK, the only country in the world (so far) to have explicitly permitted the technique. Read more [...]
The winter blues are commonplace (allegedly). Most of us in Northern climes have dull days when we'd like to float a little longer in the dreamy cloud of a warm duvet rather than tackle the cold, hard-edges of cloud computing and the day job. Limited exposure to sunlight and the feelings of lethargy it brings have even been medicalized in the form of Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD, a rather too convenient acronym, to my mind. However, there are studies that show that the so-called "winter blues" are actually more common in summer or moreover, that there is no seasonal pattern to misery and depression at all. That hasn't stopped a whole industry emerging from this "illness" selling light as a therapy. Read more [...]
This week, ELIXIR has taken a step closer to becoming the central research infrastructure for life-science information in Europe. Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom plus the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to kick start the construction of ELIXIR. Read more [...]
With the arrival of fifteen cadavers, the anatomy teaching lab in Trinity College Dublin’s new Biomedical Sciences Institute will be complete. It is already fitted with fifteen stations, each with surgical lights, a high-definition video camera and flat-screen monitor. The instructor can show the feed from any station on the monitors – all controlled from an iPad. Read more [...]
In Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) a hive fails to thrive but the bee keepers don't find the carcasses of their yellow and black striped friends. Read more [...]
A group of school children aged between 8 and 10 years old have had their school science project accepted for publication in an internationally recognised peer-reviewed journal. The paper, which reports novel findings in how bumblebees perceive colour, is published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Read more [...]
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