Crystals And Catalysts

My journey on this blog is now three years old! 🎉 It's been three years since I cut my route in academia and diverted it to science communication and I do not regret my decision one bit, because I'm enjoying every step of it and I'm doing what I love and it's brought me opportunities I wouldn't have experienced had I not started my blog. I remember I was so anxious when I  published my first blog post, were people going to like it? Were they going to hate it? Would I get a mountain of hate all over my blog and social media? When actually the science community, particularly on Twitter and Instagram, has been so welcoming and supportive throughout the years. What made me change my mind? I've always had a passion for journalism - in any form - and if I wasn't very introverted when I was a teenager, I would have gone for a career in journalism and left science behind. In one of my internships, I interned in a research and marketing company who was r...

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...

“This blog post is a part of Design Blogger Competition organized by CGTrader” Art and science, although they seem like two separate entities, are linked together with a special bond that connects them together (pun intended). Designers and scientists complete each other’s work, for example, scientists need to collaborate with designers because they need their skills to help them visualise data and enticing methods of communicating science. Therefore, each entity completes the other. During my experience in the medical communications field, a design was an essential part of our final products. Accompanying the medical writers, designers and artists collaborated with our scientific team to create elaborate sci-art which complements the PowerPoint slides or the infographic or a video-visual of a reaction or a function in the body. One of the best visuals I have seen was an elaborate PowerPoint slide showing the connection between diabetes and its effect on cardiovascular d...

Can you imagine a world without politics? Would the world be a better place without politics?  Or would humans invent politics anyway, if it didn't exist?  Knowledge is power... I try to stay away from politics as much as possible because it's a definite prescription for stress and fluctuating blood pressure. But when it coincides with your life and career, you can't ignore it. Especially when science collides with politics. Both divisions are not exclusive, they both affect the economy, education and healthcare.  During my search through the internet on the connection between science and politics, I found a quote from an article that summarises the link in one simple sentence: "Science is the pursuit of knowledge, knowledge is power, and power is politics" [10] Politicians play a big role in the funding of scientific research and how big a budget is set up for each specific research area. But it's not always about ...

Today’s post was brought to my attention by the awesome Samantha Yammine ( SamanthaZY on twitter) and she’s been a great leader of the fight against STEM stereotypes. (N.B This is not me! Photo from PIxabay CC0) Earlier this week, a popular cosmetics company launched a new product accompanied by a stereotypical slogan that refers to the idea that adorning a made-up face is more important than attending your lessons or lectures. I’m sure you’ve seen this advertisement shared around social media and I don’t think the company needs any more advertisement than the current social media attention it is currently receiving.  All over Twitter and Instagram, women in STEM have been responding with outrage, to the advertisement, sharing their beautiful selfies and their powerful academic credentials.  We, as Women In STEM, will not give in to stereotypes and we will not be silenced.  Every one of us is pursuing her career to the fullest, whether we’re in undergrad, ...

With all the research being conducted around autism, (trying to detect it earlier using biomarkers , therapy sessions, and trying to make life easier for the autistic child by engaging them in society) it's been found that sometimes, humans are not enough to solve the problem and so they've sought the help of robots. Yes, you've read that correctly, robots.  Diagnosed from early childhood, children with autism are restricted with a mental condition that prevents them from communications, expressing themselves and forming relationships with other people (adults and other children). Autistic children also have troubles with language and communicating abstract concepts. So to try and find a better method of treatment for the children, r esearchers at the Universidad Miguel Hernández (UMH) and AISOY Robotics are working together to expand the potential of their robot assistant for the treatment of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).   Welcome A...

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...

Doesn't that sound crazy? After years of research, scientists have discovered that we have a new organ in our bodies. You'd think that with all of the dissections of the human body over 100 years of anatomy study, that we would know everything about the human body by now, but no! There is still more to learn and I wonder what else do we not know about our bodies? The new organ is located in our digestive system, specifically connecting the abdomen and intestines and it looks like this and it's called the MESENTERY: Image courtesy of The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology and Science Alert For hundreds of years, the mesentery had been considered a fragmented structure made up of multiple separate parts. However, research by Professor of Surgery at UL’s Graduate Entry Medical School, J Calvin Coffey, found the mesentery is one, continuous structure. J Calvin Coffey, University of Limerick  said: “In the paper, which has been peer reviewed and ass...

I'm sure you've seen, fairly recently, a lot of advertisements calling for blood donation. Particularly in the U.K where the NHS pleads for blood donation so that hospitals and ambulances have enough blood in their blood bank to be able to provide it to patients during emergencies. However sometimes donations aren't enough, and science needs to find another solution, albeit temporary, to provide "man-made" blood for use in emergency blood transfusions. The need increases especially when stored blood is unavailable or undesirable. Undesirable being defined as the blood type of the donor blood is not compatible with the patient's blood type or there isn’t enough blood ready for transfusion with the patient’s blood type. Artificial Oxygen Carrier Dr. Doctor and his colleges and his team have developed ErythroMer which is a new artificial blood substitute which is currently under trials, testing its efficacy before its official use in health ...