Just a cup of Universe juiceThe other day, I was caught somewhat off-guard when I thought I had found entire Universe in a cup of coffee. I won't go so far as to compare my experience to Proust's "madeleine moment", but it certainly felt pretty philosophical...I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel a lot. I go by train, by plane, and, more...

French: mostly, don't speak it.On not speaking FrenchA lot of spoken French goes without saying. I don't mean that speaking it is easy or évident; I'm referring to the many silent letters in French words, especially in endings. It can be very challenging for someone learning French to know which letters to pronounce, and which to leave out. Even learning...

Whether it's collecting data in a specific environment, presenting results at a conference, or simply having to change jobs every 6-18 months until you get tenure, a life in science can mean moving around a lot.Credit: Jorge Cham, www.PhDComics.comA while ago I cam across a listicle on Buzzfeed, "29 Truths About Growing Up In Multiple Cities". Although...

(I don't usually feel the need to do this, but just in case: this post discusses (the etymology of the word) cancer and contains a moderately graphic image of a tumour, so if that's the kind of thing that might upset you, it may be best to switch to reading in HTML only or something else altogether.)Wikipedia helps avoid confusion.It's written in the...

“Science knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would stop.” - Dara O’Briain"It's only a model". Credit: Peter Murray-Rust via Wikimedia.In science, we use models to represent some part of the world in which we are interested. Some models are more sophisticated than others, leading to conclusions which are more or less likely to be valid. Because...

I recently attended the SpotOn conference in London. As well as running a workshop, I set up a game of buzzword bingo, and a caption competition. Below are the results of the latter. You can read all the entries in the comments section under the competition post.Honourable mentionsThe following people came very close to winning:Photo by Jason WenEva...