Is it cruel to keep a fennec fox . . . on a vegan diet. This was the catchily provocative title of the BBC News article that riled me up this morning. What really angers me about this whole article is the tone of the debate. The two ‘balanced’ opinions Read more…
John Bradshaw, a scientist at Bristol, wrote two fabulous books: Dog Sense and Cat Sense. They are some of the best popular science books I’ve ever read, and helped me to decide that the Animal Personality book could be a good pop science book. I cite Bradshaw a lot in Read more…
We’ve come to the last of my three considerations for ethical eating, eating with a climate conscious. Much as we have been discovering throughout this set of themed posts, there is no ‘easy’ answer to this. The climate is a complex system that is definitely heating up, but the best Read more…
For someone who works in an agricultural college, I struggle with how to eat ethically. As we know, ethics are a personal thing, and my ethics may not be yours. My version of ethical eating is one that provides a good quality of life for the animals I eat, provides Read more…
There was an interesting pair of articles in io9 last week, the report of double muscled pigs being bred by researchers in South Korea and China, and differences between how American scientists and the American public view science related issues. Seeing these two articles so closely together was interesting. The Read more…
(Edit: See below for my response to Tim Hunt’s resignation) Okay, it’s partly because I’m in marking hell right now and don’t have the time to write a big post, but it’s partly because this shit keeps happening. Nobel prize winner, Tim Hunt, addresses a collection of female scientists and Read more…
Oh, WayBack machine. You were supposed to help us find old Geocities webpages, lost in the midst of time, and now you help us see terrible articles written in Science Careers magazine. How we love you. Picture this. You’re a postdoc, you’ve just started a new job, and your supervisor Read more…
There was a great article on Gawker recently about the Food Babe blog, calling out her bad science. Now I’ve never come across the Food Babe blog, as a scientist working in agriculture I don’t think our circles mix. The article is really interesting though. I do follow It’s Okay Read more…
In the words of Bernard Black, this is fantastic. There’s a great article on Vox.com talking about science reporting and why most news reports claiming there’s a new cure for X, or that Z causes cancer, are wrong. And I use Bernard Black specifically here for an important reason – Read more…
