tMoL: Big Cell, Little Cell

I’m writing this as a homage to one of my closest friends on the blogosphere. The every wonderful LabRat has finally ended her fraught relationship with scientific research and is throwing herself wholeheartedly into science writing. Whilst I am hugely envious, I wish her all the best and hope she will remember me when she is rich and famous. Look out for her in future publications.

By way of background; Lab Rat has always had a fixation with the simpler things in life, by which I mean bacteria.

False colour E. coli, bacterial/prokaryotic cells.

All living organisms are made up of cells individual living units which are relatively self-supporting and capable of total self-replication, although this is complicated by the intricate interactions between different cells in larger organisms. Whilst larger creatures, like humans are made up of billions of cells, the vast majority of life on Earth exists as single celled microorganisms that cannot be observed with the naked eye.

Cells fall into two main groups, larger and more complex organisms, plants, animals and fungi are called eukaryotes (that’s us humans too) and have much more intricate cellular structures. The earliest forms of life, with the simplest cells are called prokaryotes, which include bacteria.

A Right Royal Easter Spring Conference

Hi everyone! Sorry for the neglect, I'm working on several things at the moment so this place has been a bit neglected (hides the cracks in the paintwork). Have no fear that I do have several things chasing each other round my brain and one or the other of them may actually make it into print shortly.

Firstly, the launch of the Easter issue of BlueSci is expected on Thursday, so it's been crazy getting that printed and making sure that the online version will be ready to go too. Thankfully I think I'm on top of that now, but that was quite a few evenings eaten.

Also, and probably most excitingly, I went to my first real, proper, grown-up conference over most of last week so what with the long hours I was a bit short on news hunting/writing time. I did however squeeze in time to write several daily pieces for ConferenceCast, which will be appearing over the next few days. It was really cool, focusing on Cell & Developmental biology so we had loads of great speakers (and the occasional dull one, but not everyone's perfect). The prize winners were all awesome and really interesting, especially the Beddington medal winning PhD student who used music to illustrate how well cells moved together during migration.

Now I finally get some time in my third and final lab of the year, 2 weeks after we offcially started, so it's going to be pretty intensive to try and get some results in just 7 weeks. Also I'm putting together a poster about the importance of science communication for a one day conference later in the week.

 I also had to watch the new series of Doctor Who, of course, which is fantastic, although like everyone else I have NO clue what's going on.

So if you've been missing my senseless ramblings you can pop over to ConferenceCast and see exactly what I've been up to and I promise to get my next proper piece up ASAP and to stop writing all about myself.

Small beginnings

Hey! Well, since this is my first post I guess I'd better introduce myself and what I'm trying to do here. For now you can call me Ret, I'm here to give you an inside view of modern biological research. I'm an avid believer in communicating biology to everyone. The point of this blog is to introduce biology to everyone, in a way that is clear and easy to understand. To dispel some of the bad reputation research has gained over the years.

I am a 23 year old, first year PhD student. I am at the University of Cambridge studying animal development; how an adult animal is formed from a fertilised egg. This is a very popular field of study, especially since the advent of stem cell research. I will also be your guide to the "Cambridge bubble" hopefully giving you some idea what it's actually like here on the inside, and showing you some of the things that go on here, besides working. Personally I spend a lot of time dancing and baking.