Money Makes The Lab Go Round

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: July 19, 2011

Caduceus By mnd.ctrl, http://www.flickr.com/photos/76578669@N00/2494389754/

Editor’s Note: Lizzie Crouch and Ben Good contributed equally to this article.

The Blast research group at Imperial College, London, is unique, from the people who carry out the research to the experiments themselves. And so when we looked into the financial support for the Blast lab’s research, it didn’t take long to uncover its unconventional nature.

“We have not supported research in the past,” explained Mrs Alison Gallico, trustee for The Soldier’s Charity (formerly The Army Benevolent Fund). But in spite of precedence, generous donations from The Soldier’s Charity, as well as a number of other veterans’ charities are the source of roughly 45% of the funding which makes the work of the Blast group at Imperial College, London, possible. This is all highly unusual.


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The Blast Mosaic

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: July 4, 2011

Over the past month or so, we’ve been spending a lot of time with the Blast crew. We’ve had a chance to sit in on their research meetings, watch them set up and perform experiments, interview them and explore their laboratories.

During some of that time, we had a camera with us, and captured dozens of as-yet unseen movies and hundreds of stills, some which we can’t show you for privacy and security reasons, but most that we simply haven’t had a chance to use so far. This video is a chance to share some of what we’ve seen with you.

The sequences loosely show a day of experiments in the lab: working away, setting up the machinery and finally, performing a blast test. We hope you enjoy.

Watch out for next week’s blog, as Ben and Lizzie tackle the ever-important issue of funding.

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Scrambled Science

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: July 1, 2011

How much can you learn from the words that make up a scientific paper? When they are in order and presented in the traditional scientific way, a great deal. However, even when they are taken out of context, you can still learn a lot about the research.

In this post we have taken a recent research paper published by the Blast research group at Imperial College, London, and created a word cloud where the size of each word varies, depending on how often it’s used.


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Call My Bluff, Science edition

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: June 27, 2011

You might think that the biggest challenge in scientific research is the research itself. But communicating science can be just as difficult. The words that a researcher might use to describe something might be unintelligible to a member of the general public, or someone from another research field.

Even worse, one word might have multiple meanings, which one you use will depend on which area of science you specialize in. This is often the case in the Blast research group at Imperial College London. In a previous post, which introduced members of the lab through their personal ‘ingredient lists’, we showed that the group as diverse as the number of toppings you could put on a pizza ”. Because of this, a new language, universal to the group, has to be learnt by all. Engineers must learn the precise words to describe the regenerative medicine aspect of the groups’ research while the shock physicists must understand the military phrasings.

1/365 [dazed & confused] By PhotoJonny, http://www.flickr.com/photos/photojonny/2268845904/

We wanted to find a fun way to illustrate the potential confusion that might result from using highly specialized terms. We turned to a popular British radio, turned television, show Call My Bluff. This is a game where two three-person teams take it in turn to give three definitions of an obscure word, only one of which is correct. The other team then has to guess which is the correct definition, the other two being “bluffs”.

See if you can have a go at our Blast lab adapted version. Here are three words used in the group’s research – can you guess which is the real definition?

Word 1: mesenchymal

So which definition do you think it is?

 

 

Word 2: friedlander

So which definition do you think it is?

 

 

Word 3: Shock

So which definition do you think it is?

 

Coming up with fake definitions and recording them saw us reduced to hysterical laughter more than once, but there is a more serious side. Clear communication is essential in making knowledge accessible to all – for scientists and science communicators out there the correct choice of words is essential.

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The responsibility of research: the dual use dilemma

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: June 22, 2011

Editor’s Note: Anna Perman and David Robertson contributed equally to this article.

“Do you worry that some of the research you do might be exploited in a way that harms people?”

Adam pauses. He leans forward, hands clasped. We’ve been embedded in Imperial College’s Blast biomechanics lab, of which Dr. Adam Hill is a key part, for about a month. It’s the first time we’ve seen a crack in his composed, assured demeanour.

“I do worry that understanding the vulnerabilities in things, that might…” He struggles for words for a few moments. We are sitting in a Westminster cafe looking out over the Thames, on a sunny day, which is strangely incongruous with the weighty topic at hand.


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The Blast Sampler

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: June 15, 2011

The Blast lab at Imperial College, London, is a research group with many flavours. There’s military personnel mingling with civilians; professors with PhD students; surgeons with mechanical engineers; rugby players with motorbike drivers; the list goes on. This isn’t unusual in scientific research; people come from all over the world, and from all walks of life, to add their skills and expertise to the mix. No two labs are the same, and we’re only just beginning to figure out who makes up each part of the unique ‘Blast blend’.

To help us, and you, get to know the group a little better, we asked them to give us a taste of what they’re like. What’s their academic background? What, if anything, do they eat for breakfast? Mac or PC? We were interested to explore how they defined themselves. Contrary to stereotypes, such as those which depict scientists as mad professors wearing lab-coats, they are regular people, and we sought to show you this in a different way.

To have a little fun introducing the members of the lab, we wanted to describe their personalities as a custom coffee recipe, listing the various ingredients that constitute the Blast lab. But, it quickly became apparent that coffee alone wouldn’t be enough to represent the group. So we had to expand the menu.

The Inside Knowledge kitchen was hub of activity, creating a product range to represent the group members we’d caught up with. By the end, we were like advertising executives trying to work out the best way to capture the essence of these products. However, we were unable to channel the charisma of Mad Men and instead had just gone a little mad. We were thinking of people’s attributes as food and vice versa. The store cupboards had been chaotically raided, the printer was running hot and we were waving desk lamps and torches around freely.

We managed to rein in the madness, and the slideshow below is our unusual way of introducing you to seven of the Imperial Blast group members. Warning: products are a representation only. Real contents may differ. If in doubt, consult your physician.



You’ll be seeing and hearing from these people more as Inside Knowledge progresses, so it’ll be worth checking back to see if they live up to what’s on their packaging!

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Next week, we’ll be exploring the difficult issue of dual-use research. What should we do when studying subjects with potentially dangerous applications, and how does this affect the people at the forefront of the research?

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A new door opens

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: June 6, 2011

Leafy West London. It’s not the kind of setting you’d expect to find such extreme research. But there, deep within the Imperial College campus, a lab is breaking bones and snapping ligaments to understand the risks posed to the human body during an explosion.

The Blast group is a true multidisciplinary research team, a collaboration where soldiers meet civilians, clinicians meet physicists, and engineers meet materials scientists. Each brings their own expertise, needs, and perspectives. Using specialized equipment to push the body to its limits, they document every aspect of its destruction. Every shattering experiment is a step closer to life-saving technologies.


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Ecosystem services: critics and defenders debate

By jamie hansen
Posted: April 20, 2011

It seemed like a case of perceptual vigilance, where suddenly the cool thing you just learned about appears to be everywhere. From a Wikipedia article on pollination to a widely-read Wired Science story on bats, the concept of ecosystem services, the subject of our blog, popped up frequently this month. That when, half a year ago, this ignorant journalism student had never heard of it.

As I asked around, however, it seemed less a case of perceptual vigilance and more that awareness of ecosystem services is on the rise. Natural Capital Project co-founder Pater Kareiva agreed that the concept has gained a lot of traction recently, with non-profits and governmental agencies ranging from the Wildlife Conservation Society to NOAA embracing it.


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Science, Upstream: The maternity shuffle

By julia james
Posted: April 11, 2011

The Cure by Deb ~*~, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ftwdeb/2813891666/

A little more than a month ago, I was listening in on a Natural Capital Project marine team conference call when Anne Guerry, the lead scientist facilitating discussion, made an offhand comment about the group’s “maternity leave shuffle.”

Jodie Toft, a Stanford fisheries ecologist, had recently returned to work after taking a few months off to have a child. But her reappearance coincided with the departure of Katie Arkema, a Stanford marine ecologist, who at the time of the call had just given birth to a baby girl.


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Road Map: explaining the Natural Capital Project and refining our story

By jamie hansen
Posted: April 7, 2011

Back at school and shaking off the accumulated inertia of spring break, Julia, my co-blogger, and I sat down to talk about Science, Upstream. “We should post a blog soon, huh?” said Julia, looking more ready to play ultimate frisbee than start reporting. I reluctantly agreed. During our two weeks of traversing the country reporting for other projects, job hunting, attending weddings and finishing final exams, our blog about the Natural Capital Project had stayed quietly in the back of our minds, like the burble coming from the fish tank you know you need to drop feed into but figure it can wait another day or two.

But now, it had been too long. The fish seriously needed to be fed and the noise had boiled up to the front of our minds, nagging us both. But neither of us were prepared to sit down and produce something profound and informative.


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