For junior academics, networking at conferences is both a great opportunity and a terrifying prospect! They offer unparalleled chances to enhance and develop your career, but one false move and you could be doomed for all eternity! Well, not quite, but there are still certain unwritten rules that might help you out a little bit. […]
Last week was the biggest, badassest, and scienceyist week of the year, as around 1000 vertebrate palaeontologists took Dallas by storm. The Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology showcases the latest research from the global community, and is a chance for us to get together and dance our socks off too (not safe […]
Recently, The Winnower partnered with the ARCS (Advancing Research Communication and Scholarship) to host a competition to showcase the rewards of being open. This was designed to enhance an already overwhelming case for practising open science, by capturing individual success stories. There were many solid entries, and you can find each one published here via The […]
Recently, Nature Jobs were kind enough to ask me to give a talk at their annual Career Expo on the role of social media as a junior scientist. In particular, I discussed how it can be used to develop a personal scientific community and enhance the research experience. . Coverage of the talk is now […]
James Lewis blogs about his latest paper combining geochemistry, blowing stuff up in the lab, and the Mars Rover missions!
“Every time you hit a paywall, that’s a publisher announcing that their role is to prohibit the progress of science as much as possible.”.
This was originally posted at: In terms of iconic dinosaurs, the gargantuan sauropods are certainly up there. Along with the mostly meat eating-theropods, and herbivorous and often armoured ornithischians, they form one of the three major groups, or clades, of dinosaurs, and were the biggest animals to ever walk this Earth. The end of the […]
This was originally posted at: “Postpublication peer review on social media is like the mosh pit at a punk rock conference. It’s fast, uncoordinated, a lot less subtle, more in your face, and involves a few more risks.’ Peer review is the cornerstone of scientific legitimacy – it is the process where research is analysed […]
This was originally posted at: It rises from the dark waters like some behemoth from the deep, and lets out a blood-curdling roar. It’s feeding time. One of the most iconic scenes from Jurassic Park III is where the long-snouted, sail-backed giant theropod dinosaur Spinosaurus emerges from underwater to try, yet again, to eat our […]
This was originally posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=1222 Often the early evolution and radiation of the first dinosaurs is an overlooked part of their tale, in favour of the more dramatic but arguably no less important tales of their later radiations and extinctions. It is actually a fairly poorly understood part of their evolution too, with the timing, […]