A short PhD student journey If we look at people’s curriculum vitae (CV) /résumés and career paths, we might think: Wow…their life runs smoothly. However, what we don’t see, and what, of course, no one usually mentions, are the many mistakes and failures. Let’s just dive right into one chapter […]
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Open science. This term has been thrown around quite a lot lately. You have seen that hashtag on Twitter. But there is something odd about it, isn’t it? What is “open science”? “Open” as in open-minded, seeking new ideas? “Open” as in transparent, not lying, not hiding any failed experiments? […]
First of all, I am no philosopher, I only have some notions and I will (mostly) rely on these. Now, why am I talking about philosophy all of a sudden? Because I will question the concept of academic freedom, which overlaps greatly with the concept of freedom, unsurprisingly. Freedom has […]
Some questions in science are grandiose and tackle issues of great social impact, like: how can we cure cancer? Others are less flamboyant, but not necessarily less important. For example, a question that is the focus of my PhD is how neurons code and relay the acoustic information. Literature describes […]
I was not able to contain zombies to one part and they spread to a second part. This time, I am tackling the more classical zombie apocalypse, the one where zombies are not created on purpose… a pandemic of some sort if you will. To start of, let us dive […]
Zombies? What can we learn about science with the help of zombies? Quite a lot, that is. Which zombies did I include? Few. Not so many zombies come with wannabe scientific explanations, but more than enough to learn about morbid themes. Make sure you can handle gruesome things before you […]
Time passes by and it has been more than 10 years that James Cameron introduced the blue aliens to the silver screen. More than 10 years that Avatar has been out and whenever someone speaks about it, I still have this song playing loudly in my mind (click on the […]
I was raised by wonderful people, who every time they were encouraged to learn something new used to repeat a slightly modified version of the known saying: “You can’t teach new tricks to an old dog”. Fun fact: The Latin-American version of this idiom is: “Chango viejo no aprende maroma […]
“We have our strategy in place. A behavior has occurred one that is reprehensible, or wonderful, or floating ambiguously in between. What occurred in the prior second that triggered the behavior? This is the province of the nervous system. What occurred in the prior seconds to minutes that triggered the […]
One of my earliest exposures to Neuroscience was when I read famous DNA scientist, Francis Crick’s book titled “The astonishing hypothesis”, in which he elegantly posited: “You—your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will—are in fact no more than the […]
I like the implication of such a title : The Real Life. So there would be a life that is not real? Not real enough? That was, at least, the question stuck in my head when I started reading this LabLit book from Brandon Taylor. First, I want to address […]
A few late experiments, some more words typed for the publication or the thesis, a couple of fixes on that analysis, turning off the devices in the lab, and finally heading home on Christmas Eve 2020… Many of us did not travel back to our home-countries, everything is special this […]
Oh boy. I knew this day was coming, the day when I would have to address the elephant in the room full of films with bits of science. Which elephant are we talking about? Well, I think you have already read the title and know we are going to take […]
Today is a bit of a different topic. Generally, I like to discover whether or not some media are scientifically relevant. Most of the time, science is bent in unusual ways to fit the world or scenario. Sometimes it is just bent. I could also say that some people are […]
So today is a bit special. Confinement and social distancing make it easier to think about oneself and guess what, this introspective mood also got to me. Just like everyone at some point in their life, I started wondering how I got to where I am; meaning doing a PhD […]
Thoughts during the self-quarantine period… # Find accurate knowledge Among the anxiety and distress of a new pandemic, misinformation is easy to come by. Some say that the COVID-19 has been made into a bigger hype than needful because of social media and sensationalism news. Let’s clarify that. Free access […]
Evolution is a film about, you guessed it, a famous shampoo brand. Any other idea would be preposterous. Who in their right mind would say that Evolution is a film about evolution? Well, I do. You do too, don’t you? As a first point, I would like to say that […]
Dr. Esther Kühn is a group leader at the Institute for Cognitive Neurology and Dementia Research (IKND). She regularly writes science communication articles for InMind—check out Why are we creative, Wenn sich das Gehirn selbst zerstört, and Warum Altern glücklich macht among other articles. Her group’s research focuses on Microstructural […]
With the recent kick-off meeting of the jNWG at the LIN, I took the opportunity to interview Dr. Sophie Seidenbecher, one of the core members of the initiative. The purpose of this was to get to know her a little bit better and hear her take on the importance of […]
Science/Fiction is a regular column that looks at error made by books, films and others whenever they include some science in their plot. This episode contains spoilers for Pacific Rim, obviously. Somehow, in films, aliens rarely come to Earth in peace. This is one more time the case in “Pacific […]
![[:en]https://www.redbubble.com/people/kdeane/works/41188219-nests-in-cerebellum?asc=u[:]](https://simpleneuro.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Neuronclip-570x350.png)
I’m currently doing my PhD in the lab where I also completed a Master’s thesis. A Master’s project is generally short and succinct so that a student, an inexperienced researcher, can do the project and write it up all within 6 months to hopefully less than a year. Sometimes the […]
There is a slowly growing push from politics into anti-intellectualism. That is – that the instincts of the political leaders are more correct in a given field of science than the experts who spent their lives in ivory towers to understand their field. Distrust of science is starting to have […]
Science/Fiction is a regular column that looks at error made by books, films and others whenever they include some science in their plot. Ladies and gentlemen, scientists are great people. I come across scientists every day, I met scientists from all over the world and all horizons, so I think […]