Crystals And Catalysts

Last Thursday I attended a media training session organised by the Science Media Centre. It bought together, journalists, scientists, researchers, press officers and people who communicate science in mainstream media, so both sides can understand and work together to communicate science correctly and to encourage scientists to be more vocal about their work and not fear media interviews. ⠀ ترجمه باللغة العربية 👇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ One key message both journalists AND scientists agreed on was that it was okay to communicate uncertainty in science. I was more surprised that the journalists agreed to this too, even though it’s sort of a public understanding that the lay public expects scientists know everything, and won’t accept “more research is needed” for an answer. When in actual fact, the main consensus was that you should communicate uncertainty when the results of a scientific study are not conclusive because that is science. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Science is not finite, as cliche as ...

This week, I have another guest on my blog, my friend Abdul who also studied BSc Medicinal Chemistry with me. Abdul graduated from University College London in 2018 with a PhD in Chemistry, before deciding to pursue his artistic passions and turning towards photography and broadcasting. In this blog post, he will be telling us about his experience in presenting Virtually Reality - a showcase by DoDo Lemons.  Enjoy! ~~~~~~ When we try to communicate complex scientific material to the world, we often get fixated on trying to insert every key term or attempt to be fun and engaging, which can make us lose our vision or the scientific message. So today, I’d like to talk about science communication through a different medium. I was lucky enough to be part of an interesting, quirky show exploring concepts of perception and its relation to mental health, such as psychosis. As part of the DoDo Lemons group , an artistic collective, I was asked to host the “ Virtually Reali...

English translation below!👇👇 : بروح الشمولية في التواصل العلمي ، قررت أن اجعل من مشاركتي على وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي ثنائية اللغة وأن أقدم ترجمة باللغتين الإنجليزية والعربية. تلك اللغتين هم لغتي الأم وما أستخدمه يومياً للتواصل مع الجميع ، فلماذا لا يتم نشره على مشاركتي؟ وبمرور الوقت ، سيتم تجميع اللغه العربيه أيضًا ليشمل مشاركات مدونتي {بلورات و محفزات} حيث أعتاد على هذا التغير وأتمنى أن تستمتعوا بالمشاركات الجديدة بقدر استمتاعي بها.  : :

I almost completely forgot that exactly four years ago today, I launched my blog! 🎊 Four years ago!  I've not been active on my blog lately, mainly because I'm working on my dissertation and my future career steps after my masters is finally over🕐😭

This blog post was my entry for the Tipbox/Abcam science writing competition (2017), although I didn't win, I'm glad I took part in the competition. Let me know your opinions on my post below in the comments. :) My love for science started when I was very young. I know that at first, I remember that I aspired to grow up to become an astronaut. My passion for space and space travel then turned into a love for archaeology and I wanted to become an archaeologist, taking my dad with me to “archaeological digs” at the museum. By the time I got to my GCSE's and A-levels I had decided that I wanted to become a pharmacist. So I interned at a local pharmacy so that I could experience what my future career would be like - it was then I realised I just couldn't spend my life dispensing medicine (no offence to all the pharmacists out there!) I just felt like I wanted to do something different. UCAS application time was imminent and I had to pick a course I wanted to s...

Sometimes when I blog, I feel like my posts aren’t being read by the audience I want it to reach – what I’m communicating isn’t reaching the audience which includes people who aren’t scientists or science communicators. It’s fantastic that scientists and science communicators encourage each other, read and learn from each other’s science blogs, but I don’t think we should keep science to ourselves, just between us scientists, or as Richard P Grant described it (albeit a bit harshly) as “tribalism”. We need to think about the impact science communicators have on the public in this day and age; although there may be a lot of science communicators, our message is not getting out to the public; who is meant to be our main audience, so science isn’t restricted to scientists only. Why should we care about who reads our blogs? One of the major issues we are facing is the issue regarding parents who are refusing to vaccinate their children.  In the year 1998, Dr Andre...

It has been a couple of months since I attended the science communication primer, held by the British Science Association, and I wasn’t originally going to review the day, but I thought it would be useful for those of you who might be thinking about going into science communication, and if your thinking about attending a similar event. It was held at Conway Hall in Holborn, London and was attended by a range of speakers including Dr Stephen Webster (ICL), Tom Chivers (Buzzfeed) and Mun Keat Looi (Mosaic) and much more. Overall the day was an enlightening experience and I learnt a lot from each of the speakers and their views of science communication and their backgrounds. Although it was a chilly October day, the hall was packed with a full-house of aspiring science communicators.  We all came from extremely different backgrounds but our intentions/goals were the same. The day started off with an introduction and welcome by Katherine Mathieson who then intro...

Whilst I was preparing a new blog post, I decided to take a break on Facebook (that’s just my way of glorifying procrastination- LOL) and I saw this post –  I'm  not going to say by who – and it was from a blog claiming to give the truth about cancer and how a certain type of chemical in food causes obesity and “excites the brain to death”.  If you know me personally, or if you realised this through my posts, I absolutely HATE scaremongering and I hate using that technique of writing in my blog.  They even use this technique to scare people into not taking protective measures against possible deadly diseases -  i.e . anti-vaxxers.  If you want to explain something, explain it without using excessive comparisons in order to scare people. Fear  isn't  the right way to explain science. There are bloggers out there that fill their blogs with pseudoscience; they are self-proclaimed experts in their chosen field, especially after  ...