Trinity College Dublin, Ecology and Evolution
It was a spring day in April 2004 when Qiang Fu first noticed the anomoly in the data. On either side of the equator – in a belt strecthing from 15 to 45 degrees latitude – the lower atmosphere was warming more than anywhere else on the planet. Fu, a professor at the University of …
At today’s NERD club, we tried our hand at explain our research using the up-goer five, which limited our available vocabulary to the “ten-hundred” most common words (thousand isn’t one of them). After some brief hesitation, the 9 of us present found out that despite being quite challenging, this can be an incredibly fun and useful activity …
Continue reading “The up-goer five: Explaining research using the “ten hundred” most used words.”
It’s rare to come across a sci-fi movie that isn’t loaded with technobabble or scientific terms that are used ever so incorrectly. In fact, a lot of the Hollywood blockbusters are guilty of mincing the scientific words and concepts for entertainment value: “The Day After Tomorrow”, “Armageddon”, “Lucy”, “The Core”, to name but a few. …
Continue reading “Spud Oddity: Did The Martian really “science the sh*t out of this”?”
Last December I was asked to participate in the TEDxUCD 2015 event. The event included 9 national and international speakers with a wide range of ideas worth spreading. Despite being asked to participate only two days prior to the event luckily I could draw on the wide research area encompassed in my new Post Doc …
Continue reading “Listening to Evolutionary Oddities @TEDxUCD”
It’s a sombre statistic: year on year, we lose up to 100,000 species. That’s somewhere between 0.01 and 0.1 percent of all species on the planet (we don’t know the exact rate because we don’t know exactly how many species exist; it could be 2 million or 100 million). The rate is thought to be at …
Interested in keeping up with developments in the world of Ecology and Evolution? Well then, you’ve come to the right place! Welcome to BlogRoll, EcoEvo’s fortnightly news and views roundup. Every two weeks, we will present a collections of some of the stories and papers that have caught our eye. In parasitology, a …
I arrived in Ireland October 2012 with the purpose of undertaking a PhD supervised by Natalie Cooper on Primates evolution. Looking back, the start of the whole endeavour seemed really stressful to me (new country, new customs, new language) and the project just as frightening (what do I do?, where do I start?, will I be able …
In 1884, the English theologian and pedagogue Edwin A. Abbott wrote a romance called “Flatland”, in which he described a two dimensional world. The rigid and hierarchically organized society of Flatland develops in the large plane in which it lives, and flat authorities control that no flat citizen (the inhabitants are all flat geometric …
For those of us with an interest in the natural world, Mute Swans (Cygnus olor) are a staple of urban wildlife in Dublin, present in many parks and along both canals. However, it has been 25 years since there has been any real assessment of the state of the Mute Swan population in the Dublin …
Splitting the atom, unlocking the secrets of radiation, or even leading a peaceful civil rights movement. I grew up knowing that these were the sorts of achievements that earn you a gold medal and an invitation to Sweden in mid-December. I have since learned that the annual ceremony held in honour of Alfred Nobel hasn’t …