I recently took time out of the day job to spend a week shadowing Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley, the Director of Innovation and Impact at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge. Shadowing is promoted by EnvEast as a part of NERC’s drive to encourage early career researchers to understand how scientists can innovate and collaborate with industry, business, government and policy-makers, rather than just between ourselves.

By Geoff Lee




Read More...

Diatoms are tiny organisms, some as small as 5 micrometers in diameter (thats 0.05 millimetres), and constitute just one branch of the phytoplankton family tree. At such a small size, you’ve probably eaten at least 10 million in your life time from all those times you took a mouthful of seawater at the beach as a child. Fortunately for us, diatoms do not share Plankton-from-Spongebob’s appetite for destruction. In fact without diatoms, and phytoplankton as a whole, life as we know it simply would not exist. These invisible engineers are the drivers of global processes, climate and habitability.

By Seth Thomas




Read More...