Martijn van den Ende, a Postdoctoral research fellow at Université Côte d’Azur, takes us through his seismoArt project – a new and colourful way of visualising the ground motions of earthquakes! First of all: how does it work? Imagine that you have an incredibly steady hand, holding a pen, and a piece of paper on a table. Once you put your pen on the paper, an earthquake happens ...[Read More]
A unique opportunity: volcanologists chase a spectacular volcanic eruption in Iceland
The second blog of the SENSOR series shares the experiences of three scientists from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS, Ireland), Dr. Patrick Smith, Dr. Nima Nooshiri, and Dr. Ka Lok Li, who are working on the exciting ‘EUROVOLC’ project to bring the European volcanological community closer together. In March, they flew to Iceland to deploy two seismic arrays near the volcano at Fagr ...[Read More]
Narcissistic abuse in academia
Let’s talk about narcissistic abuse in academia. Many of us have become scientists out of passion and curiosity. Such mental resources are crucial in research, where working hours can get long, experiments can fail, career prospects and funding are scarce. However, even the most passionate may not withstand all of the possible difficulties thrown their way — especially workplace abuse, which may t ...[Read More]
The Seismica Initiative: towards a community-driven, Diamond Open Access journal for seismological research
It all started with a tweet from @NatureNews (the news team of Springer Nature): In general, academics welcome Open Access (OA) initiatives; however, this particular tweet has been met with stiff criticism. Unethical profit-seeking, financial gatekeeping, academic elitism, and straining scientific budgets were commonly raised concerns among the many retweets and replies. Unfortunately, these conce ...[Read More]