Of Schemes and Memes Blog

Best of Nature Network, NPG staff blogs and Scitable: 16 – 22 July

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Harry Potter and the Horticultural Hogwash

As the seventh and final Harry Potter film was released this week, everyone has been talking about how the fantasy film will end. Will it stick to the plot of the book or will Hollywood take over? Well, everyone except GrrlScientist. In her latest post, Harry Potter and the Horticultural Hogwash rather than discussing the storyline, she reveals the horticultural errors made in film:

Tree expert Markus Eichhorn, an ecologist at the University of Nottingham, has a few quibbles with the trees featured in the Harry Potter films, particularly with the whomping willow, which was modeled on an elderly sweet chestnut tree at Kew Gardens.

You can find out more from Tree expert Markus Eichhorn, in the video post.

Money, money, money ….

Nature Jobs blogger Rachel Bowden has been discussing, Getting a pay rise in academia. She asks, “How long has it been since your last pay rise?” revealing some top tips for improving your salary prospects:

Whichever opportunity for a pay rise you pursue, you’ll need to justify why you should get more money. “Frame the request in terms of the value you bring to your employer,” says Deb Koen, president and chief executive of Career Development Services in Rochester, New York (see ‘Salary boost’ for more of Koen’s advice).

If you have any tips, feel free to leave a comment in the thread.

Quiz time

London Blogger Joanna Scott has been challenging readers to identify the famous scientists or inventors depicted here. Have a go at this taster from the Royal Institution’s Picture Round Quiz:

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Can you guess which famous scientist this represents? For more questions, as well as the answers, you can check out Joanna’s latest post.

Science Online in NYC and in London

This week we have been sharing some details of the latest Science Online NYC. SoNYC is a monthly discussion series for anyone based in or around New York who is interested in how science is carried out and communicated online. You can also watch from wherever you are in the world via our LiveStream account.

Each month we invite a panel of experts in a particular area to whet our appetites for a debate in 5-10 minutes before throwing open the debate to everyone present in person and online. The topic for discussion in August will be:

Reaching the niches: connecting underrepresented groups with science.

You can find out more about the session, as well as the panellists in our summary post. In order to prepare everyone for the upcoming dialogue, here on Of Schemes and Memes we will be exploring the world of the minority scientist or the scientist/science communicator who wants to reach out to other minorities. If you would like your project or your personal experiences to be featured, please do get in touch.

And if you’re based on this side of the Atlantic, don’t forget to get your ticket for Science Online London, our annual two-day conference. We announced some of the online community-sourced breakout sessions this week so do check out the "website ":https://www.scienceonlinelondon.org/ for more details.

Getting ahead with fMRI!

This week Scitable’s blogger Khalil A. Cassimally discusses how the successes of prominent interdisciplinary fields like cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, are due in no small part to the emergence of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) two decades ago.

By making use of this technology, researchers can penetrate the skull and visualize areas of the brain which are ‘activated’ at particular points in time. This technology allows researchers to correlate different areas of brain activation with particular tasks.

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Find out more about this blossoming field in his post.

Wait …that’s not what I meant!

In his post, The birth of a bad meme, David Johnson has been considering how sometimes journalists can misinterpret your meanings. He reminds everyone to be extra careful when presenting science on the web:

Obviously, this is but a tiny drop in the ocean of (mis)information transmitted daily over the interwebs. Yet, its a reminder to be extra careful of how one presents scientific findings and to keep an eye our for how others might be (ab)using these writings to support their own agendas.

David is curious to hear others’ stories of distorted reinterpretation….so feel free to share your experiences.

Light bulb

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In her latest post, Barbara Ferreira discusses the news on the Republican efforts to cancel a law that promotes the use of energy-saving lightbulbs in US households.

While I tend not to agree with most measures supported by the Republican Party, I was still shocked by this particular one. Energy-saving lightbulbs? What the hell is wrong with energy-saving lightbulbs?

You can find out more about their decisions and the opposing arguments in her post.

Down to Earth

This week saw NASA’s 30-year Space Transportation System (STS) program come to an end as the shuttle Atlantis touched down at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

The Spoonful of Medicine Blog have been reporting that the shuttle’s end could spell a bumpy ride for biomedicine in space:

It also marks the end of an era for the small group of life sciences researchers whose mice, bacteria and plants have flown on the orbital spacecrafts. Without any US government-run manned spaceflights planned for the foreseeable future, those in the field of space biomedicine have fewer options for getting their research samples into orbit and back home again.

Find out more about the future of biology ex terra and what the scientists think in the post.

As a fitting tribute, closing the door on America’s most influential era of space exploration, Nature Video has documented the program’s extraordinary feats with a fascinating film compilation. You can find a short summary about the video in our post, Love letter to the Shuttle, or on the News blog’s post, Space Shuttle: The complete missions.

Comments

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    Maxine Clarke said:

     Harry Potter is actually fiction 😉  Some licence therefore acceptable, I imagine the whomping willow would have been v hard to film doing its thing had it been portrayed by an actual willow, for example.

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    Laura Wheeler said:

    Yes Maxine I agree 🙂 I found a great article about some of the other plants in HP and how some may be closer to the truth than the whomping willow… so hopefully will please out plan experts!

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