Monthly Archives: March 2013

The Heart of the Matter – Can Our Hearts Repair Themselves?

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JosephJoseph Jebelli is a Neuroscience PhD Candidate at University College London (UCL). His research involves studying the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

When the English physician William Harvey first described the motion of the heart over 300 years ago, he might have envisioned that by 2013 we would understand the organ in its entirety. But while significant medical advances have been made, the answer to one of the most rudimentary questions about the heart remains deeply enigmatic: can our hearts repair themselves?

The answer has been steeped in controversy for over a century, but recent findings are helping to resolve the issue, with promising implications for our health. Continue reading →

The Audience You Don’t Know

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David Wescott is a Director of Digital Strategy at APCO Worldwide, a global public affairs firm. He has served as a legislative assistant to a United States Senator and administrator of a Pediatrics department at a public hospital in Boston. He blogs at It’s Not a Lecture and is a contributor at Virtual Vantage Points, Science Cheerleader, Earth and Industry, The Broad Side, and Global Voices Online. He lives in Durham, NC.

The hardest part of science outreach is not crafting a story.  It’s not getting “media trained” to appear on radio or television.  It’s not researching the intricacies of neurobiology or the techniques of persuasion.  It’s not even applying for a grant.

The hardest part of science outreach is getting started.

As many Soapbox Science readers know, this year’s ScienceOnline North Carolina conference featured some outreach-focused panels. I even co-moderated one of them.  But even though we tried to talk in depth about the strategies and tactics of outreach, we kept going back to discussing content.  It just seemed like a more comfortable topic.  Even engaging outside the sci-comm community was often described in terms of talking with “people you already know.” Continue reading →

Team Science – The Science of Collaborative Research

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Dr. Simon Williams is a Research Associate at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois. As a member of the Scientific Careers Research and Development Group, he is interested in issues of scientific training and careers, as well as broader issues related to scientific knowledge and the scientific method.

Scientists are usually the ones doing the investigating, not the ones being investigated.  However, a growing number of researchers have recently decided that it is high time that scientists themselves are put under the microscope.  This is a response to the fact that science, as practice and culture, is itself undergoing a rapid evolution.

The science of the twenty-first century looks very different to the science of the Enlightenment or even to the science of the twentieth century.  The days of the lone scientist, immersed in their laboratory, locked in their disciplinary silo, narrowly focused on basic research problems is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. In their place, we see the emergence of a new breed of “Team Science”; where  large, cross-disciplinary teams focus on complex, applied and translational problems. Continue reading →

Crime and punishment: From the neuroscience of freewill to legal reform

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Mark sMark Stokes is a senior research scientist at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, University of Oxford. As Head of the Attention Group, his research programme explores the brain mechanisms that control attentional selection for perception, memory, decision-making and conscious awareness. In addition to frontline research, he is also interested in public engagement. In 2012, he launched a neuroscience blog, The Brain Box, to discuss all matters mind and brain, covering research from his own lab as well as latest findings and controversies in the field. He has also been commissioned to contribute blog posts and comments to mainstream news providers, including the Guardian and The Independent. Mark has also appeared in science documentaries, including a Discovery Channel programme on hypnosis and has advised for BBC 1’s Bang Goes the Theory and BBC2’s Horizon. Currently, Mark is working on an article discussing the neuroscience of law and criminal justice, based on David Eagleman’s new book, Incognito. You can follow him on Twitter @StokesNeuro. Continue reading →

Why the Status of Women in STEM Fields Needs to Change

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Ben Thomas writes articles about a variety of topics for the Riley Guide, an online repository for career and education resources. As a freelancer, Ben also covers scientific research and technological breakthroughs as well as social issues involving the sciences. A regular contributor to several leading science news websites, Ben helps scientists and academics connect with the general public by explaining their latest discoveries and controversies in clear, down-to-earth terms.

It’s no secret that women are heavily under-represented in STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Though the Association for Women in Science reports that 1.3 million women are employed in STEM careers, a 2009 survey by the U.S. Department of Commerce found that those women represent just 24 percent of STEM jobs – and that they earn, on average, 12 percent less than their male counterparts. A 2012 survey of publications on J­STOR, a digital archiving service, discovered that women are also unlikely to be listed as last authors of scholarly articles – especially in the biological sciences, where the rate of female last-authorship is only 16.5 percent.

What keeps such striking gender disparities alive, even in progressive first-world nations? And what’s being done to address the issue? Here, two science advocates weigh in with their ideas. Continue reading →