How to mentor undergraduates as a postgraduate, and why it’s important
There’s a difference between mentoring and doling out to-do lists. This is something I’ve learned over the past year, my first as a mentor. Mentoring undergrads became part of my job only recently – in the past, research came first. Most advisors value research outcomes over mentoring, and departments certainly place more value on publications. Before this past year, I was used to just a single undergrad working in my lab, and I thought of them as worker bees, not as future colleagues. Read more
How to use your graduate school training to create a successful business without any investors
In graduate school, we lived by two unspoken, yet sacred, rules: you never asked a grad student when they were going to graduate, and you never asked what they were going to do after graduation. Read more
Communicating your research: get it right, do it often. It really matters.
The typical scientist, and particularly the typical early-career scientist, is so busy focusing on their research and their outputs (and grant applications and publishing and more grant applications and more publishing) that they don’t give priority to communicating their research, or even their successes, outside of that framework. Read more
New uses for everyday items: #ReviewForScience lab lessons from MacGyver
In an episode of the original series of MacGyver, starring Richard Dean Anderson as the secret-agent-cum-improviser who “busts bad guys and solves problems,” Anderson’s character builds an airplane out of bamboo and trash bags to make a getaway. Read more
Lab conflict and how to address it
Wherever you are in research, chances are you’ll encounter some degree of lab conflict during your career. Read more
How to get the best out of a conference: five tips
This week, one researcher was compelled to write to Nature, to suggest that senior scientists avoid berating their juniors during a conference presentation. Sound advice, but a shame it’s somehow a point of discussion — watching a junior scientist be shouted down at a conference shouldn’t be familiar to most when there are a thousand other, more constructive ways to engage a colleague. Read more
Is conference Twitter a good thing?
Attending a large conference is often accompanied by a flurry of excitement – daily news releases, early access to abstracts, lanyards and conference bags suddenly becoming ubiquitous citywide. Read more
Open data lessons from an astronomical atlas
The image was taken at 05:11 on the 10 February 2016, exposure time four seconds. Jupiter is in greyscale but it is beautiful nevertheless. Although the picture is static, everything about it suggests movement. Pale and dark bands run across the planet’s surface and merge; swirling like oil on water, like the grain in wood. To the bottom left, Ganymede – Jupiter’s largest moon – is visible. Read more
Still more gender differences are identified
One study suggests that the concept of “brilliance” in science might discourage some women from following certain career paths or education opportunities. Another found that women are more likely than men to offer “honorary authorships” to scientists who may not or do not deserve it—a courtesy that might obscure the magnitude of their own contributions. Read more