Over the last few months, we’ve heard about lab shutdowns, cancelled fieldtrips and virtual PhD defences, but what about the students caught in the middle? With worldwide freezing hires in academia and funding uncertainty, it’s a time of great turmoil for our young scientists. …
Alistair McGregor’s group at Oxford Brookes University, UK, uses Drosophila and the common house spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum to understand how different shapes and sizes of animals evolve. Back in 2016, two PhD students in Alistair’s lab shared a day in the life of a spider lab.
Four years and one pandemic later, we caught up with Alistair to find out how his lab has responded to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. …
“Eventually food transport was going to be stopped, so the field team were airlifted back to Cayenne.”
That was how lockdown started for members of Lauren O’Connell’s lab. Lauren is Assistant Professor of Biology at Stanford University, USA, and her lab studies how genetic and environmental factors contribute to biological diversity and adaptation.
Publishing your paper is just the start of communicating your research to the world. Some researchers feel uneasy about self-promotion, but chances are your existing network is interested in what you’re doing – you just need to tell them! Sharing your work is useful and professional. Follow our 10 tips to get started.
On Monday 23 March 2020, the Prime Minister of the UK addressed the nation in what is thought to be the most-watched moment in British television history. The speech outlined new restrictions to help slow the spread of COVID-19 as we were all told: “You must stay home”.
Monday 23 March 2020 was also the first day that The Company of Biologists became a fully remote office. In a regular working week, a number of staff members work at home but only for one or two days. Never before has the company been a fully remote office, so how are we doing it? …
The Company of Biologists is the first not-for-profit publisher to commit to this approach. …
Throughout all fields of biology there are vibrant, active and engaged communities. Social media, email, video chat and webinars mix with personal interactions as the basis of collaborations. …
When writing a research manuscript, a fundamental step is to figure out the question. Many journals won’t accept a purely descriptive manuscript, which is why it’s so important to address a non-trivial scientific question or hypothesis.
In February our preprint highlights service preLights celebrated its second birthday. To mark the occasion, we met with Cambridge-based preLighter Meng Zhu. Read the interview below, originally produced for our WeChat channel, to find out why Meng came to the UK, her thoughts on preprints and her life in Cambridge as an international student.
As relevant today as it was 11 years ago, Martin Schwartz’s essay on the importance of stupidity in scientific research has reached over 1 million people to date.
In an excerpt of his 2008 Journal of Cell Science essay, Martin’s message resonates as loudly now as it did then.
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