From rugby refereeing to film and television work, a poll reveals scientists’ first jobs and what they learnt from them. Nature Rosemary Green had many side jobs as a PhD student. Most of them bring back fond memories — but not all. She wouldn’t recommend taking part in a battle scene for the 2011 superhero film Thor, for example, because for her it involved “lying in mud for ten hours and getting really, really cold”. Green, who now researches diet
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Many scientists credit teenage jobs and university or summer side roles for imparting important transferable skills and valuable life experiences. Nature When Vijay Ravikumar was in secondary school, he would go on long evening walks with his best friend, exploring the city they lived in: Chicago, Illinois. One night in 2000, they passed a rundown shopfront. In the window, many puppets were on display, and a sign read: “Apprentice wanted”. Ravikumar, now a mathematician, had no particular affinity for puppets,
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Investigation: Rare adverse reactions after Covid vaccinations After the introduction of the Covid vaccinations, an international community evolved consisting of patients who developed serious, Long-Covid like complaints after their shot. Doctors and scientists are slowly seeing these injuries. "Someone has to stand up for these people." De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch national weekly), february 2, 2023 / Images: Milo Cardiologist Bernhard Schieffer had planned to take it easy during his final years leading up to his retirement. The professor and
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Science Magazine, 29-4-2021 / online 27-4-2021 The Eurovision Song Contest, known best for its over-the-top performances and outrageous costumes, has a new feature this year: It will be the site of a massive field experiment to see whether concerts and other events can be held safely in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nine rehearsals and televised shows, staged 18–22 May in Rotterdam, Netherlands, will each be attended by 3500 visitors who will have to show a recent negative SARS-CoV-2
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"I thought everyone would be going down the elimination path and follow the success of Asia." Reporters Online Exclusive While populations across Europe and North America are preparing for a harsh winter and the most austere Christmas in ages, their fellows in a country far away are in an entirely different situation. Early in the pandemic, New Zealand decided to go for elimination of the coronavirus. At just 100 cases and zero deaths, the experts ascertained they were - just
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Anthropologist Agustin Fuentes emphasizes COVID-19 is not just a biological event For months, we’ve been obsessed by the virus. But according to Agustin Fuentes, COVID-19 is about our social, economical, political and health infrastructures. We should no longer regard COVID-19 as a biological event. At least, that’s what anthropologist Agustin Fuentes of Notre Dame University in Indiana, argues. Of course, he recognizes the virus SARS-CoV-2 is a biological entity, and COVID-19 is characterized by significant morbidity and mortality. But we
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Last week I was pointed at an interesting analysis of the global coronavirus approaches. The author, dr. Daxin Ni, a deputy director of the public health emergency center at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and former steering committee member of WHO's Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), compared two general approaches: the SARSlike and pandemic flu-like approach. Although I want to emphasize this is not my analysis and I do not necessarily agree with all
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Science Magazine / sciencemag.org Researchers in four countries will soon start a clinical trial of an unorthodox approach to the new coronavirus. They will test whether a century-old vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial disease, can rev up the human immune system in a broad way, allowing it to better fight the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 and, perhaps, prevent infection with it altogether. The studies will be done in physicians and nurses, who are at higher risk of
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A HEALTHY DOSE OF SUSPICION Until recently, conspiracy thinkers were mainly studied to find out what derailed them. But a new generation of researchers is taking them more seriously. 'The important thing is not whether the theories are correct, but where the distrust is coming from." Originally published in Dutch in EOS Magazine 20-2-2018 The 1990s. The age of The X-Files and other tv series full of dark practices, extraterrestrial life and government cover-ups. The young Jaron Harambam (1983), who
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As science journalists who take our job seriously, we’ve learned a couple of rules by heart: never present a correlation as a causation, always check whether a sample is representative and never rely on a single study. As the expression goes: one swallow doesn’t make a summer. These are all good starting points. But they are far from making us unimpeachable in our reporting. As a result of the third principle, we tend to rely on review studies. More specifically:
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