Phew, what a day it was yesterday. Ended up having a quiet drink at the hotel. Last drink of the day – a nice cup of tea! Slept well – no nightmares about flying through space looking for somewhere to…
Articles on Scientists at work
Displaying 81 - 94 of 94 articles
It has been a busy few weeks. The last scientific experiments in support of forthcoming results. The final, detailed command sequences uploaded to Rosetta. Hotels and flights booked. As each successive…
“All systems go!” I said cautiously with a long sigh of relief. I had approved plans for the first soil analysis that would give humankind clues to the past and future habitability of Mars. One small word…
I stumbled through the forest, attempting to find a path I knew was there. It didn’t take that long to find the decaying bridge, now being overtaken by blackberry and multiflora rose. That is where I had…
I spent a few years in South Africa searching for the elusive brown hyaena. The aim of the study was to assess the differences in the distribution and abundance of brown hyaena between protected and unprotected…
Apart from a brief break in the 1960s and 1970s, British engineering and drivers have played a dominant role in setting the land speed record in the fastest cars on the planet. Starting from Lydston Hornsted’s…
A fantastic coincidence, coupled with research, led to my discovery of a wartime camp in the Jordan desert that was occupied in 1918. This was a camp used by T E Lawrence, or “Lawrence of Arabia”, and…
There is nothing intrinsic to pandas that makes them bad at breeding. It is true that they only have one menstrual cycle each year, but this is true of many creatures. Animals that have multiple cycles…
In a recent paper in Nature, we described a strange marine animal, called Tamisiocaris. They were giants that swam in the oceans over 500 million years ago. They had strange looking appendages on their…
The astronomical instrument BICEP2 was deployed at the South Pole in 2009 to look for evidence that would support the theory of inflation, which tries to explain how the universe looked a trillionth of…
Much to my excitement, my PhD research was recently published in PLOS ONE. I was studying African forest elephants that live in the dense forests of Central and West Africa to learn more about this understudied…
According to Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, establishing a permanent presence beyond Earth is the first step humans will take towards the “divergence into a new species”. Plans to visit and even colonise…
In January 2011, aboard a scientific drilling ship in the Pacific Ocean, I witnessed an enigmatic green flash before sunrise. This optical phenomenon has been recorded to occur if the conditions are just…
Antarctica is a desolate place. That much we know, but nothing prepares you for it until you actually get there. It’s cold, windy and lonely. Everything about it is the exact opposite of my normal summer…
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Staff Scientist, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Smithsonian Institution
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Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University
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Senior Research Associate, Cardiff University
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Research Associate, Manchester Metropolitan University
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Spacecraft Engineer, University of Bristol
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Former Honorary Research Associate for the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) Project, University of Oxford
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Researcher, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
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Professor of Epidemiology and Core Faculty of Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware
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Head of Specialised Assay Service, University of Edinburgh
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Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry
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Professor of Geosciences, University of Montana
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Professor of Mathematics at Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science, New York University
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Assistant Professor of Biology, Carthage College
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Professor of Wildlife Conservation, Colorado State University
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Himalayan geologist, Lancaster University