Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs

Moving house again…

Well almost, moving addresses anyway. It wasn’t that long ago I moved from Disease of the Week to here at Disease Prone to take advantage of an offer from Field of Science. While I have been super happy here, an amazing opportunity has opened up for me to move the blog over to the Scientific American’s new community and so now I can be found at Disease Prone. I know a few others from FoS are moving too and I’ll let them say their own goodbyes but for me, I wanted to say a big thank you to FoS, it’s bloggers, readers and admin for helping me set up and being so supportive when this offer was extended to me.

At some point in the future this page may be removed so if you would like to continue following me you can find me here at SciAm with my new RSS feed or here on Facebook or here on Twitter.

Thanks FoS, I’ll see you ‘round.

Zombies Pt 2 (or how I distracted my students)

Last week I mentioned how my students sidetracked me in a tute regarding introductions to the origins of life and in particular the acronym HOMR standing for Homeostasis, Organisation, Metabolism and Replication by initiating a discussion of whether or not zombies technically were alive. Well, the following week they had a test that occupied half the allocated tutorial time so instead of letting them out early I extended the discussion to real world zombies.

Zombies Pt. 1 (or how my students distracted me)

As I mentioned a little while ago I have been made an associate lecturer for first year biology at the University I have been doing my PhD at. Most of my job is taking tutorial classes and the other week during one of these classes I got totally distracted by a very interesting discussion.

Blogging 101 Workshop

Tonight I attended a Blogging 101 workshop run by a friend of mine Mr. Mike Seyfang (@fang for twits) who is a bit of a social media guru. It was really fun to go back to first principles with a room full of people learning about something I enjoy doing in my spare time and involving themselves in this time blackhole :)

So if you find yourself looking for new blogs to follow can I suggest those from the 'class'? They're new so give them time to develop and, of course, be gentle...

Other Side of Science
Heathers Sciencey Stuff
Bilbies Rule
Turk Thrust
Monianneo
Team Placenta
Sans Science
Tropidoderus
Disease of the Week

Enjoy!

Exploding Head Syndrome - No pun required

This is an old post from my previous blog. Recently it has been seeing a lot of activity so I thought I'd play around with it a bit and re-post it here. Enjoy :)

Sometimes when searching for disease to write about a wonderful thing happens. The clouds part, cherubs descend, angels play intricate harp-based musical compositions, and a beam of light illuminates the link to a wonderful disease. This happened to me the other day, and now, without further ado, let me introduce you to Exploding Head Syndrome. Best. Disease. Name. Ever.

Acute Exploding Head Syndrome sufferer (screenshot from the 1981 movie Scanners)

Capsular Polysaccharide and Pneumococcal Disease

This week looking at the capsular polysaccharide of Streptococcus pneumoniae. Want to know how I know? I wrote it :)

Insert stock photo of pneumo. Check.

It seems a little wrong to blog my own paper but in reality more people will read this blog entry than will read the paper itself, and that’s fine. Its relevance is very narrow and the work very preliminary but really it’s the drive behind the work that is important. So lets talk about Streptococcus pneumoniae (aka the pneumococcus or simply pneumo) for a second to set the scene.

What a week!!!

I have grown accustomed to the largely monotonous and repetitive life of a PhD student recently. Wake up, go to Uni, set up experiment, experiment fail, go home, sleep, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. But this week has been different.

There is significantly less Kung Fu in science than I was led to believe. Turns out its mostly repetitive bench work.

Shoutout

I strongly suggest you go read two very good posts I came across today.

The first by my friend Thomas at Disease of the Week is about leprosy in all its glory and celebrating World Leprosy Day! He's a funny guy and leprosy is always fun to read about.

The second is by FoS blogger Emily Willingham. A great piece on woo and oversimplification of science in the media specifically referring to the 'link' between having your children's tonsils out and your children becoming overweight. Apparently this common surgery is extending the childhood obesity epidemic. Well not really.

I have nothing more today, just liked these posts and thought I would share them :).