A non-traditional path to a PhD
Darrick Hansen has a low threshold for the mundane. On his way to earning his undergraduate degree, he took time off to work in far flung places in between his studies in the US, Singapore, and Scotland. Read more
Darrick Hansen has a low threshold for the mundane. On his way to earning his undergraduate degree, he took time off to work in far flung places in between his studies in the US, Singapore, and Scotland. Read more
Sports science is the study of the body as a performance machine. Its specialties span biomechanics and psychology, and demand for its experts is growing. Whether it’s helping everyday people with their physical wellbeing or training elite athletes to react faster endure longer or jump farther, sports scientists and performance consultants are playing an increasingly important role in exercise and competition. Read more
Since childhood, Karla Terrazas has wanted to be a teacher. While an undergraduate at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), she tutored students in maths. “I like maths, and I enjoyed helping them like it, too,” she says. During her senior year at UTSA, when she was an undergraduate summer intern in the lab of developmental biologist Marianne Bronner, PhD, at Caltech in Pasadena, California, Terrazas became intrigued with experimental science. Read more
Since the advent of life 3.6 billion years ago, the survival of all species has depended on rapid innovation at the genetic level. As a consequence, our planet has grown rich with evolved technologies. Read more
In the 4 May Nature technology feature, I explore the growing use of smartphones to drive scientific research. Today’s phones are so full-featured, they’re often ready for use out-of-the-box. Sometimes, though, a custom app is required, and that can be a sticking point, as programming a mobile app isn’t easy. Read more
Wandering the convention center among 30,000-plus researchers, students and vendors at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego last November, I struggled to wrap my head around a feature I was writing for this week’s Nature, on managing big brain data. Mice, molecular biology and cell sorting reigned supreme in my former life as a bench scientist. Neurons, brain imaging, terabytes — not so much. So when it came time to find an entry into the vast universe of the brain, I latched onto something that seemed small and manageable: the fruit fly. Read more
When preparing a grant or publication, where can you turn for new ideas? You can bounce ideas off colleagues, search PubMed and Web of Science for related literature, and maybe take a trip down Google lane. But it’s difficult to get outside one’s particular area of expertise — to mine the opportunities at cross-disciplinary boundaries unless you know what you’re looking for. The developers of a new document search engine hope to make such cognitive leaps easier, finds Jeff Perkel. Read more
As a business development officer at STEMCELL Technologies in Vancouver, Canada, Ben Thiede evaluates new technologies and negotiates deals that bring scientific advances to market. He describes his move from graduate studies toward law and into his current position. Read more
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