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130. Coronavirus, and Life Outside the Lab

It has quickly become a new way of life – working from home, avoiding restaurants and gyms, and ‘social distancing’ from coworkers, friends, and even family.

The upending of normal routines happened so quickly, and the days have become so blurred together, that it’s hard to keep track of just how long we’ve been confined to our apartments and homes.

We know that scientists and doctors at the NIH, CDC, virology labs, and hospitals around the world continue their front-lines fight to understand and treat the pandemic, and we are deeply grateful.

But what about all the other scientists? The research faculty, postdocs, grad students, and technicians whose research doesn’t cover RNA viruses or epidemiology?

Even though they are not working directly on understanding COVID-19, they still have important experiments to do. They have cell cultures, fruit fly lines, and mouse colonies to maintain. The have classes to teach or take, dissertations to write, and theses to defend.

What happens to them when the University closes, and experiments are forbidden?

This week, we catch up with those scientists, to understand how they are adapting to life and science in a pandemic.

085: Scientists in the Newsroom – The AAAS Mass Media Fellowship feat. Rebekah Corlew

Pick up any newspaper and you’ll find an article summarizing the ‘latest research’ on the health benefits of chocolate, a new treatment for Alzheimers, or the long-term risks of screen time for your toddler.

As a scientist, you probably groan before you reach the end of the title: the claims are extreme, the statistics are dubious, and often, the information a reader should know is buried below the fold.

If you’d like to see science communication reach new levels of accuracy and relevance, it may be time to step away from your lab bench and pick up a pen.

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067: Science Magazine Takes a Teeny, Tiny Step Toward Open Access

If you read the following headline this week, you might have experienced a small thrill:

AAAS Forms Partnership to Expand Access to
High-Quality Scientific Publishing

AAAS, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the organization that publishes the flagship journal Science Magazine and related titles.  You might believe from that headline that you could now access Science articles for free from anywhere in the world!

You’d be wrong.

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066: Should Scientists March on Washington?

Though techniques and terminology vary from one scientific discipline to another, all scientists are bound together by a set of core principles.

We call this the “scientific method,” and the approach is sacrosanct.

Observe the world around you, state a hypothesis to explain what you’ve seen, devise an experiment to prove yourself wrong, and report your findings so that the next inquisitive mind can build upon your work.

So what happens when an elected official seeks to erode the foundations of scientific inquiry?

Scientists take to the streets.

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Queen Christina and Descartes team up

056: Team Up for Speedier Science – #modernPhD Part 3

When we think of scientists, we often think of the lone researcher plodding away at the bench late into the night.  We imagine Alexander Fleming scrutinizing his penicillium molds or Einstein pondering the latest equation he’s written on the chalk board.

We go a step further when training new scientists: we ask them to complete an ‘independent research project.’  We tacitly perpetuate this notion of the solitary scientist, making her own success or failure.

The side effects of this lone-wolf approach to research are painfully manifest: projects that stall on a single experiment, money wasted teaching everyone the same techniques, and students who burn out due to frustration, lack of direction, or just plain loneliness.

In Part 3 of our goal to modernize the PhD process, we propose a radical 180º turn from the independent project.

Let’s turn science into a team sport.

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