This week, Cédric Thieulot, Assistant Professor at The Department of Earth Science, in Utrecht, shows that there is no place for humor in peer reviewed scientific publications. Science is serious. It’s about experiments, theory, analysis, and for most of this readership maths, physics, chemistry, biology, geology and so much more. It’s serious business, with funding, promotion, titles, grants and ...[Read More]
Cooking of course! Let me explain. This week, instead of doing his job, Antoine Rozel (senior researcher in ETH Zürich), shows that all your life problems will instantly disappear if you start cooking. Warning, this introductory paragraph is not going to cheer you up, skip it if you are already feeling blue unless you want to suffer a little more (that’s OK). Clearly the explosion of number ...[Read More]
This week Ana-Catalina Plesa, Junior Research Group Leader at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Berlin/Germany takes us on a journey to Mars. Enjoy the read about how spacecraft observations and numerical models provide InSight into the deep enigmas of the “red planet”. Over the course of its evolution, Mars has accumulated heat in its interior arising from the planet’s formation, differentiati ...[Read More]
A very important part of science, which is getting more and more attention, is how to share and manage our data. This week, Adina E. Pusok, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, shares thoughts and tips on how to make our science fairer. So, what is FAIR for Geodynamics? This is a big question! I would say that what is fair for geodynamics is fair for a ...[Read More]
This week, Jac van Driel, PhD student at UCL shares with us his deepest thoughts on how to write the manuscript of his PhD thesis. Hoping you will enjoy: “An Ode to the Coffee House”. Like many cordial expressions of civilised society, Covid-19 has plunged café culture to into stasis with the permanence of its condition not yet known. Pre-crisis, my hedonistic consumption of coffee use ...[Read More]
This week, Craig O’Neill, Associate Professor and director of the Planetary Research Center at MacQuarie University shows that not only humans are suffering from the consequences of global warming. The recent Australian bushfire season has precipitated a shift in the Australian – and the world’s – perception of the urgency of addressing climate change. With most of the east ...[Read More]
‘Now, more than ever, we need science’, thinks the editor of this blogpost as he works from his small studio paid by a rent-burdened academic salary while under lockdown in California due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the need for an open, fair, inclusive science seems to be ignored all across the world by policy makers and university administrations, who refuse to pay graduate st ...[Read More]
This week, Antoine Rozel, senior researcher in ETH Zürich, gives us good news about carbon footprint. We can take the global warming problem as a pretext to change some of our arbitrary habits and make our communication much more efficient! Global warming is real and yes we do need to drastically decrease our carbon footprint. I see 3 options: 1) not caring, 2) feeling guilty about it and not doin ...[Read More]
An important part of science is to share your results in the form of papers. Perhaps, even more important is to make those results understandable and reproducible in the Methods section. This week, Adina E. Pusok, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, shares some very helpful tips for writing the Methods in a concise, efficient, and complete way. Writin ...[Read More]
This week, Gael Choblet, CNRS research associate in the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique (University of Nantes and Angers), tells us everything about the interior of Enceladus, an interesting icy moon of Saturn! This is my first contribution in these pages. The choice of Saturn’s small moon Enceladus as a topic mostly results from my acquaintance with this planetary body. Yet, the reade ...[Read More]