I’m in Berlin. I’ve just managed to find a chicken donner kebab, and am pausing research briefly to write this. I’m currently on leave from London, with a ridiculously hectic couple of months ahead: I’ve just been to Munich to see a dwarf crocodile specimen, Alligatorellus beaumonti (from Bavaria), which conveniently happened to coincide with Oktoberfest, …[Read More]
Retired blogs
An aerosol is born: solving the nucleation recipe
One of the most fundamental aspects of aerosols that we are continually striving to understand is how they are actually born. One pathway that aerosol particles can take is a process known as “nucleation“. This nucleation process is where new particles are formed by gaseous molecules getting together and deciding that they’ve had enough of the gas-phase …[Read More]
Conference diaries: Goldschmidt 2013
Following on from Mel Auker’s report on her visit to Japan for the The IAVCEI Scientific Assembly, Bristol PhD students Kate Hibbert and Sorcha McMahon tell us about their recent trip to Florence for Goldschmidt 2013. What? The annual Goldschmidt conference is a major geochemistry conference, alternating between Europe and North America each year. With …[Read More]
Blog Competition (Highly Commended) – Ekbal Hussain: In the Name Of Allah, the Most Merciful
For our Blog Competition 2013, we asked for people to submit articles addressing one of two topics. Ekbal’s article discusses the role of religion in disaster management, and his entry was highly commended by our judging panel. Ekbal is currently a PhD student at the University of Leeds. His work involves geodetic monitoring of strain …[Read More]
Friday Photo (99) – Fitting Life Around Geology
Geology exerts a strong control on landscape, agriculture and infrastructure in Ladakh, India. Here the road (left hand side) is cut into softer glacial moraines, rather than the igneous and metamorphic bedrock. Agriculture is centered on alluvial material from a river predominantly fed by glacial meltwater. (c) Geology for Global Development 2013
The role of aerosol uncertainty in climate change
For those who follow [pun intended] the world of climate science on Twitter, you’ll very likely have noticed a string of tweets from a meeting at the Royal Society on the “Next steps in climate science“. The programme (PDF here) has included a wide range of topics relating to climate science and has included a …[Read More]
Science Snap (6): SEM images of a high-pressure experiment
Sorcha McMahon is a third year PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. Sorcha is investigating how strange igneous rocks called carbonatites may have formed, using both natural samples and high-pressure experiments. These back-scattered electron (BSE) images are a typical view of one of the high-pressure experiments that I …[Read More]
That’s one small step for dinosaur-kind..
This is a guest post by Collin VanBuren. He’s currently starting his PhD at the University of Cambridge researching the effects of climate change on living and fossil frogs, as well as the relationship between the shape of anatomical structures and their function. He loves the outdoors, biomechanics, and conservation, and regularly tweets about these subjects …[Read More]
GfGD Conference Reminder – Three Weeks To Go!
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Soliciting peer reviews from PhD students
This post does not discuss science per se but the topic is important from a personal point of view and hopefully useful to others in a similar position (i.e., PhD student currently putting together their first papers and hoping to learn more about the peer-review process). Feedback from those at a similar stage as well …[Read More]