The story behind the story: Simple things

Posted by Colin Sullivan |

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome back Rebecca Birch with her story Simple things. Rebecca first appeared in Futures with her tale Are you receiving? and later with Ice and white roses. You can find out more about her work and keep up to date with her activities on her website. Here, she reveals what inspired her latest piece — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Simple things

Simple Things was inspired by a visual writing prompt — a tree standing alone on a cliff looking out over a vast forest.  It was clear that the tree would have to play a major role in the story, but I wasn’t at all sure what sort of role it would be until I decided that such a striking tree would probably be important to any folks who happened to be in its vicinity.

As I delved into the story, I found I wanted to explore how people, who had been marooned by science-fictional technology gone wrong, dealt with their solitude.  How the tree became a beacon for one man, the physical manifestation of his hope and optimism.  How the other man, who had lost his hope, managed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, his survival dependent on those simple things, and how he would face his life when he was finally, truly alone.

I hope that through writing this story, I’ve reminded myself of the importance of having an Old Lookout of my own, so that when things get hard, I’ll remember that tenacity and old-fashioned stubbornness can see a person through a great deal — even if that stubbornness is as basic as one step following the next.

Never discount the importance of the simple things.

Bonding in Boston: The importance of networking in science

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Naturejobs journalism competition winner Ashish Nair finds new hope at our Boston career expo.

A long time ago in a land galaxy far far away, there was a great gathering where those weary of the well-trodden trail of tenureships and grants repaired themselves. The gathering in question was the Naturejobs career expo, a free one-day event organized for students and scientists alike. Featuring some truly inspiring speakers, it gave a much-needed boost to my hope for a career in science that can be both emotionally and financially (yes, $$$) satisfying.

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What does it take to be a mentor?

Posted by Subhra Priyadarshini | Categories: , ,

Let’s talk career with Naturejobs

Beginning this week, Indigenus will bring you some interesting and relevant posts from sister blog Naturejobs, a leading online resource for scientists in academia and industry who seek guidance in developing their careers. The blog delivers a mix of expert advice and personal stories to help readers review, set and achieve their career goals.

We kick off with a guest blog by Nirmala Hariharan, an adjunct assistant professor at UC Davis’ School of Medicine, where she mentors in and researches molecular signalling pathways for basic cardiovascular sciences.

Being a great M.E.N.T.O.R will help you just as much as your students, says Nirmala Hariharan

Guest contributor Nirmala Hariharan

Mentoring is one of the most crucial roles played by faculty on a day to day basis. As a mentor, you provide scientific and technical guidance, and serve as the pillar of support for your team of students, postdocs and trainees. Mentoring can consume a lot of your time, and be very demanding, but has several long term benefits that will help you run a successful lab. Here’s what a great M.E.N.T.O.R provides for their students.

Nirmala Hariharan

Nirmala Hariharan

Motivation. You’re the constant source of motivation for your team; you need to see the big picture and guide your team through the ups and downs. You’re the leader that inspires excellence and encourages scientific innovation. As a good mentor, you must recognise the true potential of your mentees – even if they don’t – and know how to bring out the best in them. In short, you should make them realise what they’re capable of.

Emotional Support and Connection. As a mentor, you need to provide emotional support to your mentees as they struggle to find their place in science. Career decisions are strongly impacted by the irregularities of life generally, so be willing to discuss and share incidents from your life that helped you tackle problems in science, and balance your personal life with your work.

Connecting with your mentees on an emotional and personal level helps them recognise that you’re available when they need support and encourages them to reach out when they need it. An emotional connection helps in building a mutually beneficial, professional relationship of respect and friendship, which will hopefully last for many years.

Networking. One of the most important roles of a mentor is to help mentees build strong professional relationships by introducing them to your own network. Conferences are fantastic avenues to network, and giving credit to your mentee and directly introducing them to your friends and colleagues has tremendous advantages for both of you.

Teaching. A good mentor has to be a good teacher. Your day to day tasks will include teaching experimental procedure, scientific concepts and writing, and helping with data analysis and general troubleshooting. Mentoring requires tremendous patience and – importantly – also requires allowing your mentees to make mistakes and learn from them themselves.

Opportunities for Career Growth. Providing opportunities for your mentee’s career growth is extremely important, so make sure to discuss goals often, and encourage mentees to think about their progress.

There are many ways you can provide opportunities for career development to your students – review their CV and professional materials, encourage them to apply for awards that demonstrate their excellence, discuss potential job opportunities and alternative career choices, and teach them how to excel at self-promotion. The more your mentees grow in their careers, the more satisfaction and recognition you’ll get for being an awesome mentor.

Role model. Ultimately to be a good mentor you have to be an excellent role model. Practice what you preach, demonstrate integrity in your professional and personal interactions, and show by example how to balance work and life. Be resilient, handle rejections, efficiently manage time and make sure to be a caring mentor.

It’s never too early to learn how to mentor – start now if you haven’t already. Mentoring is different from classroom teaching and requires hours of personal interaction. Getting over your inhibitions or issues with communication are important to excel as a mentor. Have patience and keep developing as you mentor people with different personalities. Remember it takes time to build trust with your mentee and you’ll get better with time and practice. Get feedback, and take suggestions and negative critiques seriously, so you can improve.

Being a mentor means being a ‘Guru’, a Sanskrit word that literally means ‘one who dispels darkness’ – a person that shows the way to pure knowledge. Mentoring is one of the most rewarding and exciting aspects of being a faculty member. Enjoy the ride because the more you give, the more you get back.

[Originally posted on 01 Feb 2016 on Naturejobs]

Mitochondrial protein functions

Posted by Bioentrepreneur |

Image source: Ryan Lynch

Mitochondria are energy-generating organelles that carry a portion of their own DNA. Mutations in mitochondrial proteins are associated with metabolic disorders, neurodegenerative diseases and a variety of malignancies. Joshua Coon, David Pagliarini and their colleagues generated proteomic, lipidomic and metabolomic data on 174 strains of yeast, each carrying a mutation in a different protein implicated in mitochondrial function. In their paper in the November issue of Nature Biotechnology, they show how connections among these different data sets can be exploited to reveal new insights into the biosynthesis of coenzyme Q, an essential lipid required for oxidative phosphorylation. Their paper can be found here.

Away from home: Proteins in Germany

Posted by Jack Leeming | Categories: , , , , , ,

We’re bringing you the best stories on lab mobility from Nature India

Beginning this week, we will take a peek into the lives of Indian postdocs working in foreign labs. Our blog series ‘Away from home’ will feature one postdoc every Tuesday recounting his/her experience of working in a foreign lab, the triumphs and challenges, the culture factor, tips for Indian postdocs headed abroad and what he/she misses most about India.

Kangkan Halder

Teeing off the series for us is Kangkan Halder, who completed his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Applied Synthetic Biology Group at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

Science and I

I am not sure what really got me interested in science, but I guess I was plain curious about things. I also liked the idea that in science there is a specific answer/reason for a specific question/observation. On the other hand, for any generalization there is always an exception too! And I was really curious to know these exceptions.
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A look out to a dark Universe: Three young scientists share their thoughts

Posted by Jack Leeming | Categories: , , ,

Young scientists from Nature’s Outlook on the dark Universe share their views on dark matter, gravitational waves, and dark energy.

You can find the full Outlook, covering the Lindau conference, Nobel prize winners, and Q&As with George Smoot and Brian Schmidt, here.

WEB_Astronomy-sky_65870

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Uncertain Airspace: Changing career paths is disorienting and exhilarating

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Pursuing a new career makes PhD student Jonathan Wosen feel like a baby goose—and he loves it.

Sometimes I ask people, “if you weren’t studying biology, what would you do?”

At first, they’re taken aback, and I don’t blame them. PhD students are self-selected for a certain kind of persistent, focused thinking; that’s what it takes to become the world’s leading expert on your thesis project. We are as deeply immersed in our work as a fish in water. That makes asking a graduate student to consider a different field of study a lot like asking a fish to imagine life on dry land.

Clownfish_in_blue_water-smaller

“We are as deeply immersed in our work as a fish in water. That makes asking a graduate student to consider a different field of study a lot like asking a fish to imagine life on dry land.”

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Winners of the Scientific American Innovators Award Turn Trash into Water Filters [Video]

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Guest post by Andrea Gawrylewski, collections editor at Scientific American

After 50 hours in a lab, three Ohio eighth graders convert Styrofoam food containers into a patent-worthy new water filter

SA-innovators-award

Scientific American Innovators Award winners (from left to right) Julia Bray, Luke Clay and Ashton Cofer
Credit: Andrew Weeks

World-changing ideas may just come from our youngest scientists. This year’s winners of the annual Google Science Fair—including the winners of the Scientific American Innovators Award—were announced this week at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The event is the largest online science fair in the world, and since its inception in 2011 more than 30,000 teenagers have submitted projects in almost every country.

“Kids are born scientists,” says Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina, who served as head judge at the fair. “They ask great questions and we should foster their efforts to learn the answers firsthand.”

For the past five years Scientific American has partnered with Google to award the Scientific American Innovator Award, which honors an experimental project that addresses a question regarding the natural world. This year’s award went to three eighth graders from Ohio who were particularly disgusted with the amount of Styrofoam (polystyrene foam) trash they saw in their everyday lives—the material accounts for 25 percent of landfill space, and is exceptionally difficult to recycle or reprocess.

The team of Julia Bray, Luke Clay and Ashton Coffer, all age 14, analyzed the chemical structure of Styrofoam and determined that it is composed of over 92 percent carbon. This sparked their idea: They hypothesized that they could use heat to convert the Styrofoam into activated carbon—which could then be used to filter water. After 50 hours of experimental work, the team successfully converted the polystyrene into carbon with over 75 percent efficiency by heating the material to 120 degrees C. They then treated the carbon with a set of chemicals to increase the surface area of the material, and tested it against commercially available water filters. Their results showed that their carbon successfully filtered many of the same compounds that commercials filters remove from water.

“Styro-Filter is just the beginning of an innovation to take dirty waste and make clean water,” Bray explains in her team’s video summary of the project. The team has filed for a provisional patent for its filter-making process.

The winners of the Scientific American Innovators Award share a $15,000 cash prize. The grand prize of the Google Science Fair went to Kiara Nirghin, a 16-year-old from South Africa who used orange peels and avocado skins to devise a superabsorbent material that can absorb and hold 300 times its weight in water. She hopes that the nontoxic material can be used to boost agriculture in water-scarce regions.

“All of the finalists produced inspiring work,” DiChristina says. “It’s thrilling that the judges chose such exciting candidates from all around the globe.”

This article originally appeared at Scientific American on 28 September 2016 and was republished with permission.

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How is the rise of data-intensive research changing what it means to be a scientist?

Posted by Jack Leeming | Categories: , , , ,

Data-intensive research requires a new breed of scientist: interdisciplinary analysts who enjoy swimming in data, says Atma Ivancevic.

There has always been an emphasis on the generation of novel data in science. Being a scientist involves progressing from observation to hypothesis to experiment to output. In the past, a combination of scarce data to look at and low throughput machinery to make more has led to limited experimental outcomes.

2016-09-12-Atma Ivancevic 04-smaller-cropped

Atma Ivancevic

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Reactions: Haibo Ge

Posted by Marshall Brennan | Categories:

haibo_geHaibo Ge is a Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and works on the development of novel transition metal-catalyzed C–H functionalization processes and structure-activity relationship studies of anticancer agents. His group recently published a paper entitled “Site-selective C–H arylation of primary aliphatic amines enabled by a catalytic transient directing group” in Nature Chemistry.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I was amazed by the “magic” results from arranging different elements when I was a middle school student. Later, I was attracted by the art of synthetic chemistry and the applications in pharmaceuticals.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?

If I weren’t a chemist, I would want to be a pilot since I enjoy the feeling of flying “freely” in the sky. However, I have never had this experience, and thus it might not be realistic.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

We are working on the site-selective C–H functionalization of simple substrates such as aliphatic amines and aldehydes via transition metal catalysis. I hope that it will lead to the practical use of these methods in process chemistry.

4. Which historic figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

Mozi, an ancient Chinese philosopher and the founder of the school of Mohism. More impressively, he was also a great scientist with prominent knowledge in geometry, physics, optics, etc.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?

I was running a Suzuki-Miyaura coupling reaction together with a new graduate student about two weeks ago if that counts.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

For the book, I would like to take the ancient Chinese book Strategies of the Warring States. For the music album, I would like to have the Collection of Chinese Classical Music with me.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?

Vy Dong because she is such a creative chemist.