Working Scientist
204 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★ - 21 ratingsWorking Scientist is the Nature Careers podcast. It is produced by Nature Portfolio, publishers of the international science journal Nature. Working Scientist is a regular free audio show featuring advice and information from global industry experts with a strong focus on supporting early career researchers working in academia and other sectors.
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Episodes
Using live transport data to deliver sustainable cities
June 03, 2024 13:50 - 16 minutes - 15.5 MBLynette Cheah’s research group collaborates with psychologists, computer scientists and urban designers to develop smarter and more sustainable ways of city transportation. “We can’t have sustainable cities without transforming the way people move and how goods are moved around,” says Cheah, an engineering systems researcher who is based at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Cheah outlines some challenges to meeting targets in the eleventh of 17 Sustainable Devel...
How artificial intelligence is helping to identify global inequalities
May 27, 2024 18:40 - 27 minutes - 24.9 MBFrancisco Ferreira’s first exposure to inequality of opportunity was during his daily ride to school in São Paulo, Brazil, and seeing children his age selling chewing gum on the streets. Ferreira, a former World Bank economist who now researches inequality at the London School of Economics, speculates on the wasted human talent caused by such hardships, and how many more scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and writers there would be if inequalities could be tackled at an early stage in chil...
Infrastructure projects need to demonstrate a return on investment
May 20, 2024 07:52 - 21 minutes - 19.6 MBPower networks are humankind’s biggest engineering achievement to date, says Sinan Küfeoğlu. But ageing infrastructure in advanced industrialised economies, coupled with the fact that around one billion people in the world lack continuous power access, particularly in Global South countries, could threaten the delivery of Sustainable Development Goal 9 by 2030, he warns. The goal promotes resilient infrastructure, inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and innovation. Speaking in a pe...
Decent work for all: why multinationals need a helping hand
May 13, 2024 09:16 - 15 minutes - 14.1 MBIn Kenya, where Moses Ngoze teaches entrepreneurship and management at Masinde Muliro University in Kakamega, micro, small and medium enterprises provide 75% of jobs and more than 80% of the country’s gross domestic product. Typically these organizations employ between one and 100 people and include subsistence farming, hospitality and artisan businesses, mostly operating in a jua kali environment, a Swahili term meaning “hot sun,” he says. Ngoze's research explores how the enterprises can ...
How artificial intelligence is helping Ghana plan for a renewable energy future
May 07, 2024 09:03 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBJulien Harou’s career started in geology in his current role as a water management and infrastructure researcher now straddles economics and engineering, with a particular focus on using artificial intelligence (AI) to measure Ghana’s future energy needs. Harou is relatively upbeat about progress so far towards achieving sustainable and reliable energy for all by 2030, the seventh of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by the United Nations in 2015. He points out that from 2015 ...
How a young physicist’s job move helped Argentina join the ATLAS collaboration
April 15, 2024 09:21 - 21 minutes - 17.6 MBMaría Teresa Dova describes how an early career move to CERN as the first Latin American scientist to join Europe’s organisation for nuclear research ultimately benefited both her but also the researchers she now works with back home in Argentina. The move to Geneva, Switzerland, where CERN is based, required Dova to pivot from condensed matter physics, the subject of her PhD at the University of La Plata, Argentina, which she gained in 1988. But any misgivings about the move to Europe an...
How to plug the female mentoring gap in Latin American science
April 05, 2024 10:49 - 15 minutes - 12.7 MBA 2021 report by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean revealed that only 18% of public universities in the region had female rectors. Vanessa Gottifredi, a biologist and president of Argentina’s Leloir Institute Foundation, a research institute based in Buenos Aires, says this paucity of visible role models for female scientists in the region means that damaging stereotypes are perpetuated. A female, she says, will not be judged harshl...
‘Maybe I was never meant to be in science’: how imposter syndrome seizes scientist mothers
March 29, 2024 15:37 - 20 minutes - 16.2 MBFernanda Staniscuaski earned her PhD aged 27. Five years later she had a child. But in common with many scientist mothers, Staniscuaski, a biologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, saw funding and other career opportunities diminish as she combined motherhood with her professional life. “Of course I did not have as much time as I was used to have. And everything impacted my productivity,” she tells Julie Gould. The Brazilian biologist founded the Parent in Science adv...
‘Hopeless, burnt out, sad’: how political change is impacting female researchers in Latin America
March 22, 2024 16:18 - 21 minutes - 16.9 MBPaleontologists Ana Valenzuela-Toro and Mariana Viglino outline some of the challenges shared by researchers across Latin America. These include funding, language barriers, journal publication fees and conference travel costs. But the two women then list some of the extra burdens faced by female researchers who live and work there, many of which will resonate with female colleagues based elsewhere. “When you are in a room sharing a scientific idea or project, nobody listens to you. Then an...
How we connect girls in Brazil to inspiring female scientists
March 18, 2024 15:51 - 10 minutes - 8.63 MBIn 2013 physicist Carolina Brito co-launched Meninas na Ciência (Girls in Science), a program based at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul. The program exposes girls to university life, including lab visits and meetings with female academics. “There are several girls who have never met someone who has been to university,” says Brita. “It’s beyond a gender problem.” Jessica Germann was one of them. The 19-year-old is about to start an undergraduate physics degree. She tells Jul...
‘There is no cookie cutter female scientist’
March 08, 2024 11:40 - 27 minutes - 21.9 MBIn her role as Vice Rector for research partnerships and collaboration at the University of the Valley in Guatemala City, Monica Stein works to strengthen science and technology ecosystems in the Central American country and across the wider region. To mark International Women's Day on 8 March, Stein outlines the steps needed to attract girls into science careers. Access to higher education needs to widen, she argues, alongside more robust legal and regulatory frameworks to make research ca...
How Tiger Worm toilets could help to deliver clean water and sanitation for all
March 01, 2024 13:10 - 20 minutes - 18.9 MBLaure Sione’s postdoctoral research at Imperial College London addresses the sixth of the 17 United Nations SDGs, but, she argues, sanitation also plays a huge role in gender equality (SDG 5) and good health and well being (SDG 3) targets. Sione’s PhD research focused on water management challenges in Kathmandu, but she now focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa and the problems caused by open defecation and excrement-filled pit latrines that are sited too close to the water table, risking contamina...
How we boosted female faculty numbers in male-dominated departments
February 23, 2024 11:58 - 20 minutes - 18.7 MBIn 2016 the University of Melbourne, Australia, asked for female-only applicants when it advertised three vacancies in its School of Mathematics and Statistics. It repeated the exercise in 2018 and 2019 to fill similar vacancies in physics, chemistry, and engineering and information technology. Elaine Wong and Georgina Such tell the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast why certain schools wanted only female candidates to apply, and how staff and students reacted to the policy. They also...
Building robots to get kids hooked on STEM subjects
February 16, 2024 11:02 - 19 minutes - 17.9 MBAs a child Solomon King Benge loved Eric Laithwaite’s 1974 book The Engineer in Wonderland, based on the mechanical engineer’s 1966 Royal Institution Christmas lectures. After reading it he asked his physics teacher if he and his classmates might try some of Laithwaite’s practical experiments, but was told: “Don’t waste your time with this. This is not important, because it’s not in the curriculum.” The rejection promoted Benge to launch Fundi Bots in 2011. The social education initiative ...
‘It reflects the society we live in where a young person does not feel that life is worth living’
February 09, 2024 09:57 - 28 minutes - 26.2 MBA drive to reduce suicide mortality rates is a key indicator of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Psychiatrist Shekhar Saxena, who led the World Health Organization’s mental health and substance abuse program after working in clinical practice for more than two decades, says that although progress is being made, a worryingly high number of young people are choosing to end their lives. “They have to struggle through the school education, competitive examinations, then they ha...
‘Blue foods’ to tackle hidden hunger and improve nutrition
February 02, 2024 10:36 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBAs a nutrition and planetary health researcher, Christopher Golden takes a keen interest in the second of 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and its aim to end hunger. But Golden’s research also focuses on “hidden hunger,” a term he uses to describe the impact of dietary deficiencies in micronutrients such as iron, zinc, fatty acids, and vitamins A and B12. Hidden hunger, he argues in the second episode of the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series, could be better ad...
People need more than cash to rise out of poverty
January 26, 2024 11:08 - 21 minutes - 20.1 MBPoverty is about more than just meeting basic material needs, says Catherine Thomas. Its corrosive effects are also social and psychological, causing people to feel marginalized and helpless. Thomas’s research into anti-poverty programs has focused on the effects of one aimed at women in the West African country of Niger, which aims to support subsistence farmers whose livelihoods are impacted by climate change. One branch of the program involved providing an unconditional $300 cash transf...
Chandrayaan and what it means for India's brain drain
December 14, 2023 12:00 - 26 minutes - 21.3 MBIn August the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft touched down, making India only the fourth to have successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon. In this special episode of the Working Scientist podcast, Somak Raychaudhuryan astrophysicist and vice-chancellor at Ashoka University, tells Jack Leeming about India’s history of space research, the significance of the lunar landing, and how it might help to stem a “brain drain” of Indian researchers moving abroad permanently to develop their careers. The...
Why we need an academic career path that combines science and art
December 08, 2023 12:51 - 32 minutes - 45.1 MBFor a three-year period as a postdoctoral researcher, molecular biologist and visual artist Daniel Jay was given both a lab and a sudio to work in. In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist about art and science, Julie Gould asks why, decades later, Jay’s experience is still unusual. Why do scientists with expertise in, say, music, sculpture, pottery or creative writing have to pursue these interests as weekend hobbies, with science “paying the bills?” Jay, who is Dean of the ...
How to create compelling scientific data visualisations
December 01, 2023 10:50 - 29 minutes - 41.2 MBData form the backbone of the scientific method, but it can be impenetrable. In the penultimate episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art-science collaborations, Julie Gould talks to artists and data visualisation specialists about how they interpret and present data in art forms ranging from music to basket weaving. Keep things simple wherever possible, agree Duncan Ross, chief data officer at the Times Higher Education publication, and James Bayliss, an interacti...
How ChatGPT and sounds from space brought a “luminous jelly” to life
November 24, 2023 09:58 - 28 minutes - 38.6 MBGUI/GOOEY is an international online exhibition that explores digital and technological representations of the biological world. In the fourth episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, Julie Gould talks to some of the artists and scientist whose collaborations created exhibits for the event, which ran from March to June 2023. Its curator Laura Splan, an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, says GUI/GOOEY reconsidered how technology af...
Scientific illustration: striking the balance between creativity and accuracy
November 17, 2023 09:37 - 23 minutes - 32.8 MBIn the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about art and science, artists and illustrators describe examples where accuracy is key, but also ones where they can exert some artistic licence in science-based drawings, sculptures, music and installations. For Lucy Smith, a botanical artist at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, measurement and accuracy is important, she says. But accuracy can sometimes take a back seat for illustrator Glendon Mellow, who is also a...
The unexpected outcomes of artist-scientist collaborations
November 10, 2023 12:15 - 23 minutes - 21.8 MBArtist and illustrator Lucy Smith helps botanists to identify new species. Usually they request a set of drawings, she says, with a detailed set of requirements. But Smith, who joined London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, more than 20 years ago, says: “We also feed back to the scientists and say, 'I’ve seen what you’ve asked me to see. But do you know what, I’ve also seen this? Did you know that this flower has this structure.'” In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podca...
Art and science: close cousins or polar opposites?
November 03, 2023 10:17 - 26 minutes - 36 MBIn the first episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series, Julie Gould explores the history of science and art and asks researchers and artists to define what the two terms mean to them. Like science, art is a way of asking questions about the world, says Jessica Bradford, head of collections and principal curator at the Science Museum in London. But unlike art, science about interrogating the world in a way that is hopefully repeatable, adds UK-based artist Luke Jerram, who cr...
Could new ‘narrative’ CVs transform research culture?
October 13, 2023 13:25 - 31 minutes - 44 MBNarrative CVs are increasingly being used by funders to capture how a successful grant application will positively impact society and promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Crucially, the narrative format also acknowledges contributions from citizen scientists, local communities and administrator colleagues. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the largest public funder of UK science, is one adopter. In September 2021 it announced that its new approach would “enable people to better d...
How to craft a research project with non-academic collaborators
October 06, 2023 08:48 - 34 minutes - 47.3 MBIn the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about team science, Richard Holliman describes a project involving indigenous researchers in Guyana who wanted to limit insecticide spraying without jeopardising the South American country’s efforts to tackle malaria. The early warning system they developed with Andrea Beradi, an environmental systems researcher and a colleague of Holliman’s at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, involved satellite technology, drones and groun...
“Couldn’t cut it as a scientist.” How lab managers and technicians are smashing outdated stereotypes
September 29, 2023 07:49 - 33 minutes - 46.4 MBElaine Fitzcharles, a senior lab manager at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), says the role is sometimes wrongly perceived as someone who “couldn’t cut it as a scientist.” Fitzcharles and her team oversee five BAS research stations, its main facility in Cambridge, UK, and the research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough. Their responsibilities include advising on health and safety, import licenses, and chemicals and kit can be taken into the field. Their skillsets are completely differen...
Culture clashes: Unpicking the power dynamics between research managers and academics
September 22, 2023 08:05 - 36 minutes - 50.1 MBBefore launching his own consultancy in 2021, Simon Kerridge worked as a research manager in UK academia. “We’re the oil in the cogs,” he says of the role, adding: “Obviously, it’s a service profession, but we have to be careful not to be subservient.” But how empowered do research managers and administrators based in other countries feel, particularly those working in nations with rigid hierarchies, or where the profession is less established? Allen Mukhwana leads ReMPro Africa, a researc...
This alternative way to measure research impact made judges cry with joy
September 15, 2023 06:48 - 31 minutes - 43.7 MBThe UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) collects research outputs from UK universities and is used by the the country’s government to distribute around £2 billion in research funding. But its focus on publications to measure outputs has drawn criticism. The Hidden REF, set up in 2020, looks at alternative measures. Simon Hettrick, its chair and director of the Software Susaintability Institute at the University of Southampton, UK, explains what can be submitted, and why publications a...
“Just get the admin to do it.” Why research managers are feeling misunderstood
September 08, 2023 11:48 - 34 minutes - 47.5 MBIn the first episode of a six-part podcast series about research culture and team science, research managers Lorna Wilson and Hilary Noone describe how their skills and expertise can help deliver better research outputs, particularly when their contributions are better understood and valued by academic colleagues. Noone, research and innovation culture lead at the funding agency UK Research and Innovation, recalls the discomfort felt all round when an academic colleague tells a meeting: “Ju...
A funder's guide to tackling setbacks and winning grants
August 31, 2023 16:21 - 31 minutes - 25.2 MBIn November 2021, Maria Leptin became president of the European Research Council. After a long career in biological research, Leptin admits that starting the process of closing her lab at the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) before taking up her new role, was difficult. “You win some you lose some,” she tells Nature careers editor Jack Leeming of this new career step. “It's painful, but that's the decision I've made.” Leptin shares some advice for early career researchers writ...
Sexual harassment in science: tackling abusers, protecting targets, changing cultures
July 20, 2023 14:39 - 33 minutes - 45.7 MBIn late 2021 a BuzzFeed investigation revealed a catalogue of sexual misconduct incidents at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). Ecologist Sarah Batterman, one of more than a dozen women to speak out about their experiences, describes what happened to her and the impact it has had on her career. Batterman, who filed a formal complaint to the institute in 2020 after being contacted by other women with similar experiences of harassment and abuse at STRI, tells Ada...
Bullying in academia: why it happens and how to stop it
June 28, 2023 16:14 - 20 minutes - 28.4 MBMorteza Mahmoudi witnessed bullying behaviours during a series of lab visits following his PhD in 2009, and now studies the topic alongside his role as a nanoscience and regenerative medicine researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing. In 2019 he co-founded the Academic Parity Movement, a non-profit which aims to end academic discrimination, violence and bullying across the sector. In the seventh episode of this podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Mahmoudi tells...
Magical meeting: a collaboration to tackle child malnutrition in Bangladesh
June 21, 2023 14:27 - 14 minutes - 11.9 MBAs a child of the Space Age, Jeffrey Gordon dreamed of becoming an astronaut and discovering life on Mars. Instead he found fascinating life forms and interactions closer to home, inside the gastrointestinal tract. The microbiome researcher, winner of the 2023 Global Grants for Gut Health Research Group Prize, tells Julie Gould about his research focus and the workplace culture in his lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri. Gordon also describes the “magical ...
How to deliver a safer research culture for LGBTQIA+ researchers
June 02, 2023 13:05 - 44 minutes - 61.2 MBA professor invites colleagues and their partners to a Christmas party but reacts negatively when a young gay researcher asks to bring his future husband along. A Black carnivore researcher conceals their bisexuality and pronoun preferences when doing fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa. These two experiences are among those recounted in this Working Scientist podcast about the challenges faced by researchers from LGBTQIA+ communities. Paleantologist Alison Olcott, who co-authored a 2020 study...
Trolled in science: “Hundreds of hateful comments in a single day”
May 26, 2023 15:02 - 43 minutes - 59.9 MBAtmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe realised she was the only climate researcher in West Texas when she joined Texas Tech University in Lubbock, 15 years ago. Within a few months she was being asked to address community groups about climate change, but also a growing number of posts from social media trolls who disagreed with her, many of them misogynistic in tone. The situation has worsened since October 2022, she says. This follows amendments to Twitter’s free speech policies after th...
Dodging snipers, fleeing war: displaced researchers share their stories
May 19, 2023 12:49 - 32 minutes - 44.1 MBHassoni Alodaini hoped to complete a PhD when war broke out in his native Yemen in 2015. But as research funding dried up as a result of the hostilities, Alodaini fled to Egypt. His arrival there marked the start of a three-year journey to reach the Netherlands, much of it on foot, via Greece, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, the Czech Republic, and Germany. In the fourth episode of a seven-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Alodani describes how it feels to have his research...
Science on a shoestring: the researchers paid $15 a month
May 12, 2023 13:49 - 29 minutes - 40.7 MBIn the third episode of this seven-part Working Scientist podcast series about freedom and safety in science, researchers in Nigeria, Venezuela and Ukraine describe what it is like to live and work in struggling economies. Ismardo Bonalde currently earns around $500 a month in his role as an experimental physicist and superconductivity researcher at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research in Parroquia Macarao, but at times it has dropped to $15 in a country where inflation was 234% ...
Shielding science from politics: how Joe Biden’s research integrity drive is faring
May 05, 2023 06:45 - 39 minutes - 54.3 MBIn January 2022 the Biden administration announced its long-awaited strategy to safeguard scientific integrity across US federal research facilities and agencies. But 16 months on, do researchers working in those organisations feel better protected than they did under the administration led by Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump? The Union of Concerned Scientists, a US non-profit and advocacy organisation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has tracked more than 200 examples where scienti...
Unlocking the mysteries of the brain’s neocortex
May 03, 2023 18:23 - 26 minutes - 23.9 MBefJf Hawkins’ 2021 book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, focuses on the neocortex and how it helps us to understand the world around us, before examining the future of artificial intelligence, based on what we already know about the brain. In this final episode of Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series about neuroscience, Hawkins describes how his book finishes on a philosophical note, by covering the future of humanity in an age of intelligent machines. Hawkins i...
How to keep Ukraine’s research hopes alive
April 28, 2023 09:53 - 38 minutes - 53.5 MBIn the first episode of a six-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Ukrainian neuroscientist Nana Voitenko relives how she and colleagues fled Kiev when war broke out in February 2022, and how the country’s research landscape and infrastructure has fared since. Also, physicist and climate scientist Liubov Poshyvailo-Strube describes her involvement in the Ukranian Global University (UGU), and how it is helping academics access educational and research opportunities outsid...
How trauma’s effects can pass from generation to generation
April 26, 2023 14:50 - 17 minutes - 16.3 MBIsabelle Mansuy’s neuroepigenetics lab researches the impact of life experiences and environmental factors on mental health, exploring if these impacts can be passed on to descendants. Epigenetic inheritance, she says, is not confined to diets and exposure of factors such as like endocrine disruptors or environmental pollutants. All of these can modify our body and have effects in our offspring. But Mansuy, who is based at the University of Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology i...
How deep brain stimulation is helping people with severe depression
April 21, 2023 11:03 - 24 minutes - 22.7 MBDeep brain stimulation (DBS) is an experimental treatment strategy which uses an implanted device to help patients with severe depression who have reached a point where no other treatment works. But despite her involvement in the DBS collaboration, which involves neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, electrophysiologists, engineers and computer scientists, neurologist Helen Mayberg does not see it as a long-term solution. “I hope I live long enough to see that people won't require a hole in thei...
Restoring the sense of smell to COVID-19 patients
April 14, 2023 15:23 - 17 minutes - 16.4 MBThomas Hummel, who researches smell and taste disorders at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany, describes international efforts to help patients who have lost their sense of smell, perhaps as a result of COVID-19, head trauma, chronic rhinosinusitis, and neurodegenerative diseases. Hummel points to the development of cochlear implants to help patients with hearing loss. “There could be similar implants inside the nasal cavity connected to the olfactory bulb, eliciting a pattern t...
Understanding the difference between the mind and the brain
April 07, 2023 06:38 - 24 minutes - 22.6 MBIn 2020 the forced isolation of pandemic-related lockdowns led many of us to attend virtual fitness classes and undertake home baking projects. Chantel Prat wondered why she wasn’t interested in taking part. “I couldn’t help but notice and be frustrated by the fact that my brain was responding to the pandemic in a way that seemed very different from the people around me,” she says. At the time Prat was writing her book The Neuroscience of You. Published in 2022, it explores how different br...
The hospital conversation that set a young epilepsy patient on the neuroscience career path
March 31, 2023 13:49 - 26 minutes - 24.7 MBA child neurologist treating Christin Godale’s epilepsy was so impressed with his young patient’s interest in the brain he gave her some of his textbooks to read during an extended stay in hospital. “He said I should consider a career in neuroscience. That moment really changed my life,” says Godale, who followed his advice and went on to research epilepsy for her PhD at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. Godale describes how at one point she was experiencing up to 30 seizures a day and s...
How ice hockey helped me to explain how unborn babies’ brains are built
March 24, 2023 12:59 - 23 minutes - 21.4 MBIn his 2022 book Zero to Birth, How the Human Brain is Built, developmental neurobiologist William Harris includes ice hockey analogies to describe how the body’s most complicated organ develops in the womb, drawing on a 40-year career studying fruit fly, salamander, frog and fish embryos. Harris, professor emeritus at Cambridge University, UK, played the sport growing up in Canada and is now a coach. “A coach will have tryouts and select the best players for different positions,” he says. ...
The brain science collaboration that offers hope to blind people
March 17, 2023 10:38 - 19 minutes - 17.5 MBAn applied goal of Pieter Roelfsema’s lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam is to create a visual brain prosthesis aimed at people who have lost their sight. To help achieve this goal, the lab partners with both neurosurgeons and artificial intelligence researchers. “We are knowledgeable about how to put electrodes in the brain,” says Roelfsema, “but we collaborate with experts who know about how to make these electrodes so that they don't damage the brain tissue t...
Social sponges: Gendered brain development comes from society, not biology
March 10, 2023 12:10 - 23 minutes - 21.2 MBGina Rippon was a paid-up member of the “male-female brain brigade” earlier in her career as a cognitive neuroscientist, but changed tack, she says, after discovering there was not a lot of sound research behind the well-established belief that male and female brains are biologically different. In the fourth episode of this 12-part podcast series Tales from the Synapse, Rippon explores the role of social conditioning to explain why boys and girls might respond differently to pink and blue o...
What happens in our brains when we're trying to be funny
March 03, 2023 11:41 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBAfter a mostly miserable childhood in the small Israeli village of Tel Aviv (his words), Ori Amir moved to the US, where he gained a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and launched a second career as a stand-up comedian. Amir is now a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he researches what happens in our neural networks when we are trying to be funny. His interest in this was triggered after realising there were around 20 studies examining brain activity when we are enjoy...