Scientific events in Boston
Boston blogger, Tinker Ready, has been alerting those in the area to a jam-packed week of scientific events and you can keep updated on the latest events by checking out her calendar. This week, she will be focusing her blogging efforts on viruses and she’ll be heading over to the AIDS @ 30 event. Do let us know if you plan to attend any of these events, or if there is anything missing from the calendar.
Don’t forget that we’ve also created Google Calendars for some of the other major science cities: Paris, London and Cambridge in the UK and DC, NYC and San Francisco in the US. Below you can find links to all of the Google Calendars we have put together:
Please do let us know if you can see any important omissions, or if you would like to contribute to any of the calendars.
SONYC!
Join us on Thursday December 8th, in person at Rockefeller University from 7pm EST, or online via our Livestream channel for the seventh SONYC! The topic for discussion will be, Matching medium and messengers to meet the masses.
Reaching an audience that’s already interested in science is relatively straightforward; however, reaching a broader audience can be challenging. Attracting and maintaining an audience outside the core of science enthusiasts requires a carefully crafted match of the medium and messenger. This SONYC will consider when and how scientists and science communicators should seek to highlight science issues to the general public? Should we be ready to respond and correct public misunderstandings or attempt to influence science policy? What material can be handled through social media and what requires a more involved form of engagement, such as a science festival?
The event is free to attend with an opportunity to meet the panellists and other attendees afterwards. If you’d like to follow the vocal online discussion, keep an eye on the #sonyc hashtag or check back here for our write-up and Storify of the online conversations. Do continue to check the official Twitter account for more information.
FameLab
FameLab, set up in 2005 by Cheltenham Science Festival, is the international competition for science communicators and this week the London heats have begun! Kings College London is the venue for the heats, with a winner and a wildcard from each heat making the final next Wednesday. Over the next few days, Nature Network London will feature interviews with the winners and wildcards. First up is wildcard and Imperial PhD student, Edward Yoxall:
How did you become interested in communication and have you ever done anything like this before?
I’ve never done anything like FameLab, but I guess I’ve always enjoyed being on stage. Gives you such a rush! I’ve been working for the BBC on the ‘Bang Goes the Theory’ roadshow as a science demonstrator, so that’s been pretty good practice for speaking in front of crowds. It’s also been good at making me pitch at the right level – finding the balance between complexity and simplicity is definitely one of the hardest parts of the job.
Do keep an eye on the London blog for the remaining interviews.
Nature Outlook: Allergies
The increased prevalence of allergies and asthma, especially in the developed world, has raised the stakes in the quest for prevention and cure. In light of this, the latest Nature Outlook supplement is all about allergies. Nature Network blogger Paige Brown features in the supplement with her article, Atopy: Marching with allergies, where she details her lifelong struggles with allergic disorders and hyper-reactivity:
My mother, herself allergy-prone, remembers my inflamed and itchy skin lesions in infancy. These are classic symptoms of atopic eczema, better known in the United States as atopic dermatitis. Then, in my toddler years, as my father recounts, I started to show “this peculiar reaction” around animals, scratching at my throat as my eyes went red, watery and swollen. These typical symptoms of allergic rhinitis, or hay fever, owe their origins to human immune-system responses to specific protein allergens, for example those found in animal dander:
You can read the whole, free supplement here.
#Scitweetups
Science Tweetups are a great way to meet local scientists and science communicators for an evening of chitchat in the pub. There are now regular tweetups in NYC ( #NYCscitweetup, ) Cambridge, UK ( #camscitweetup ) and Washington DC (#DCscitweetup. )
The sixth #NYCSciTweetup is on Thursday 1st December at the Peculier Pub. Join in from 6.30pm onwards.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there is also a pre-Xmas #ukscitweetup in London; here’s the doodle poll where you can vote for your preferred dates. To find out who else is attending, watch the #ukscitweetup hashtag on Twitter.
It is question time
This week NatureNews have been asking via their brand new Facebook page, “Who owns your lab notebook?” In response to a legal dispute about missing notebooks in Nevada, some have wondered whether most working scientists even know who technically owns their lab notebooks. So, for the working scientists out there, is it clear that the research notes you take generally belong to the institution you work for? You can respond to their FB poll here and make sure you “like” them to keep updated on the latest news.
For those interested in Nature’s other social media presences, we also have a Twitter list cataloguing all of our NPG Twitter accounts and we also have a Google + circle featuring all the NPG Google+ pages. This circle will be continuously updated as and when accounts are created.
