The confidence factor

Here’s something that might surprise you: One of biggest hurdles we face getting guests on our podcast is not stage fright or scheduling conflicts but confidence. We send a lot of emails to friends, friends of friends and women we have some tangential connection to in order to convince them to take an hour out of […]

Retraction Watch: Nerd tabloid or societal good?

We work hard for the privilege of being scientists. We study, we do research, we struggle and we fail. We spend time in dark rooms and cold rooms and mouse rooms and we work weekends and nights and holidays. And when we’re very lucky, we publish the product of all that effort. But stuff happens, […]

(Micro)bio – Meet Tiffany Gasbarrini

Happiest of new years, dearest listeners! To ease in to 2016, we present to you another installment of our (Micro)bio series. It’s only three minutes! So grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and learn all about Tiffany Gasbarrini, Senior Editor for Power, Energy and Sustainability Engineering at Springer Nature.

Herpes: The virus we may not want to hate so much

For decades we have known that microbes cause many diseases known to plague us as humans (did you see what I did there?). It’s easy to identify the microbes that cause disease but it’s harder to identify the microbes that do not harm us or more interestingly the ones that actually benefit our survival. Now some resourceful folks […]

Episode 14: The (High School) Science Fair

Lads and lasses, welcome back for another exciting episode. Today, for your listening pleasure, we delve into the world of high school science with Diana Gibson, a teacher at a Washington, D.C. charter school. Join our discussion about the differences between teaching teenagers and adults, Bigfoot, and 3D printing. Oh, and lots, lots more. Happy […]

The Smart Girls science video missed the mark. Here’s why.

It’s been one week since Smart Girls at the Party released their science video series starring comedian Megan Amram, and I’ve been trying to figure out why I felt so appalled by it. You can watch the episode below: David Kroll from Forbes quoted my initial reaction to the piece: For a site that’s empowering girls […]

Did you hear? Pentaquarks!

If you weren’t too busy waiting for photos of Pluto, you might have heard some news coming out of CERN, Geneva, this week. LHCb, an experiment based at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator there, announced that it had found evidence for a completely new type of particle – a pentaquark. That might sound slightly […]

The CRISPR gene revolution, all the cool kids are doing it

CRISPR: It’s all the rage. It’s time to pack up your pog collection and Lisa Frank organizational system. If you want to be cool right now and you happen to be molecular biologist, you should probably be ‘CRISPRing’ something. What is CRISPR? Isn’t that the drawer in my refrigerator where vegetables go to die? Is it even a […]

The ongoing fight against #Ebola

What we’ve learned from the most recent Ebola outbreak The most recent reports from the CDC estimate over 10,000 deaths as a result of the current Ebola outbreak. That number of deaths is more than 6 times the deaths from all previous ebolavirus outbreaks combined since its discovery in 1976. At a recent Harvard Medical School seminar a doctor from Sierra Leone shared […]

Episode 4: The (Medical) Giving Tree

Molly Lindquist

  Once there was a tree… and she loved a boy, very, very much — even more than she loved herself.” — Shel Silverstein Today’s podcast features Molly Lindquist, a mom, breast cancer survivor, and founder of Consano, a non-profit crowdfunding platform for medical research. Listen as she shares her inspiring story. Then go to https://www.consano.org/ and donate to a research […]