Hulda Jónsdóttir wears inflatable protective suits like these to study lethal viruses.Credit: Spiez Laboratory Virologist Hulda Jónsdóttir studies some of the world’s most pathogenic viruses at the Spiez Laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland. For her, highly pathogenic viruses are more often a source of curiosity than of concern. Jónsdóttir, who runs a research group at the … Read more
Policymakers often work behind closed doors — but the documents they produce offer clues about the research that influences them.Credit: Stefan Rousseau/Getty When David Autor co-wrote a paper on how computerization affects job skill demands more than 20 years ago, a journal took 18 months to consider it — only to reject it after review. … Read more
In Unrooted, botanist Erin Zimmerman shares her struggle to balance research and family.Credit: Kenneth Wurdack Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save An Old Science Erin Zimmerman Melville House (2024) Nineteenth-century English suffragist Lydia Ernestine Becker, a lifelong advocate for women’s right to vote, was also an accomplished botanist who discovered a peculiar hermaphrodite … Read more
Podcasts and radio appearance can disseminate your science and raise your profile.Credit: Mixetto/Getty Eighteen months ago, I had zero media experience. I’m a physical-activity researcher in the school of Allied Health and Human Performance at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. In the three years since completing my PhD, I hadn’t written articles for … Read more
The way that users get information from the web has evolved over the years. People used to rely on news sites and Google to keep abreast of what was going on in the world, but then Twitter arrived and cemented itself as an alternative (and often inaccurate) source of news. Although it’s facing the threat … Read more
South Korean science minister Lee Jong-ho and European commissioner for research Iliana Ivanova celebrate South Korea joining Horizon Europe in March. Viewing research through a security lens makes it harder for other non-EU countries to follow.Credit: HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Last month, the European Commission published a ‘course correction’ for its Horizon Europe research fund, which is worth … Read more
Last September, while completing a grant application, I faltered at a section labelled ‘summary of progress’. This section, written in a narrative style, was meant to tell reviewers about who I was and why I should be funded. Among other things, it needed to outline any family leave I’d taken; to spell out why my … Read more
When Lisa McCorkell got COVID-19 in March 2020, her symptoms were mild. Her physicians told her to isolate from others and that she would recover in a few weeks. But the weeks stretched into months and McCorkell, who was working on a master’s degree in public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, started having … Read more
In February, I was meant to speak at the European Conference of Tropical Ecology in Lisbon, providing evidence of extinction risks to some frog species used as bushmeat in West Africa, and highlighting the need for policies that regulate hunting pressures. In January, I duly applied at the Dutch embassy in Accra for a business … Read more
Generative AI might be a powerful tool in making research more accessible for scientists and the broader public alike.Credit: Getty Thinking back to the early days of her PhD programme, Esther Osarfo-Mensah recalls struggling to keep up with the literature. “Sometimes, the wording or the way the information is presented actually makes it quite a … Read more