Brain/Body

Life logging is something I’ve been doing for ten years. Except, I didn’t know life logging was a thing. I am an accidental life logger and I only log one aspect of my life and that’s running. I am also an accidental runner. At fifteen I…

Caffeine worshippers relax! It turns out those routine cups of coffee are actually saving your heart, as well as keeping you energised throughout the day. South Korean researchers studied more than 25,000 participants through routine…

Cannabis is always a talking point, even in the world of science, which might actually say something about our culture that we are so fascinated with drugs… but that’s a topic for another post. Today, I want to talk about the latest paper…

Mammals do it, bees do it. Even one type of bird does it. As the days get colder and shorter and the rain drizzles down, soon to turn to ice and snow; as you think about wet socks and permanently cold feet, trudging through…

I like to ask phlebotomists for an approximation of how much blood they’ve drawn over the course of their careers. Then I always add “in units of bathtubs, if you please.” No one has ever given me a good answer. Not one phlebotomist in…

Cancer is clever. People speak about this extraordinarily diverse and complex group of diseases as if they were one disease and ask us impatiently when we are going to “cure” it. The reality is that many researchers, myself included,…

When I first studied cancer medicine as an undergraduate, my lecturer described chemotherapy as “beating up the patient with a baseball bat in the hope that you get the cancer on the way.” Chemotherapy has benefits, but the side effects can…

I stood in pitch darkness. I couldn’t see it or smell it but I knew that a metre away stood a mannequin composed of compacted dried blood. Every thirty seconds a luminous drip splashed down, briefly highlighting the contours of the face,…

"Gas! Gas!….flound’ring like a man in fire or lime… guttering, choking, drowning… blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” Few things evoke the horror of battle as powerfully as Wilfred Owens’ Dulce et Decorum Est. Even…

So you’ve decided you want to get a Ph.D. in science and you’re wondering what to do next. You aren’t sure which program to choose, how to select a mentor, how to make it to the other side with your regalia intact. Why dedicate…