This is the complete conversation I recorded with Dr. Nuno Henrique Franco on Animal Wellbeing in research. We talk about why we do animal research, which ways there are to avoid animal research, the policies surrounding animal use and housing, EU legislature, and outreach approaches to inform the public.

Dr. Nuno Henrique Franco is Assistant Researcher at the Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde, i3S (Institute for Investigation and Innovation in Health) at the University of Porto, Portugal. His research focuses on laboratory animal welfare, along with ethical, legal, social and scientific issues in animal research.  

BART vs DENNIS LIVE! We are playing a pseudoscience game!

And you can win a T-Shirt from our store by sending us your funniest Pseudoscience story!

Team BART email: bart@scienceforprogress.eu

Team DENNIS email: dennis@scienceforprogress.eu

Dr. Helena Jambor is science writer at the university hospital of the Technical University in Dresden, Germany. Besides allowing her to learn about medical research, the work allows her to spend much of her time with figures and data visualization (DataViz).

Helena teaches DataViz in talks, blogs, and – hopefully soon – her book. And she offers consulting, too. Visual communication surrounds us everywhere in our modern lives. Arrows point the way, pictographs help us navigate public transport, logos communicate the brands’ preferred image, etc. Visualizations are also key to allow society to understand scientific research findings. To communicate their scientific findings to the public, and to engage in dialogue, scientists must learn to produce visualizations that are understandable. This applies when communicating to journalists, teachers, and politicians, but also within the scientific community.

During her curation at @sfprocur, Helena wants to convey how scientists use DataViz 1) to unambiguously communicate data within the scientific community; 2) to handle bigger and bigger data sets that require effective visualizations to be analysed; 3) to engage with society about their findings. She would like to initiate a discussion about a DataViz curriculum and spark interest in this important topic.

background

Dmitry Kopelyanskiy is a PhD candidate in immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is also a passionate science communicator who believes that science belongs to everyone and should never be boring or overly complicated.

In his week at @SfPRocur, he will share his experiences in popularizing science via outreach events, science festivals, and online. “Science can be very interesting, inspiring and even fun. Dare to try it yourself!”  

For this episode I speak with Dr. Rüdiger Eichel, professor for Materials and Processes for Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage at the RWTH Aachen University, and Scientific Director for the Institute for Energy and Climate Research at the Research Center Jülich in Germany.

Dr. Eichel gives us an insight into the chances and challenges of the Energiewende. The new found interest in climate issues in the public that can be seen in the Fridays for Future movement and the outcomes of the EU parliament elections, make him optimistic. He now sees the chance to talk with society about the technical possibilities to switch to fully renewable energy sources, how long it might take to implement, and how much it might cost financially and in terms of living quality.

The extended episodes of our podcast are only available for Patrons for the first 7 months before they are made public.

In this episode we talk about a new “overlay” journal, which circumvents a couple of sources for Conflicts of Interests. We then discuss whether every scientists needs to be involved in science communication, especially whether they should be forced to write a jargon-free abstract for lay people. And finally we talk about genetically modified crops, animals, and humans!

Hey everyone!

We have had a bit of trouble to get curators, lately. It appears people are particularly busy this time of the year.

If you are interested in curating @sfprocur on Twitter for a six days (Tues – Sunday). Please get in contact!

Open Slots:

June 25-30
July 16-21
July 23-28
September 10-15
September 24-29
October 1-6

Write to me under info@scienceforprogress.eu, and tell me who you are and what you want to tweet about!

thanks!

Dennis

Once a month Bart Geurten and I talk about current topics in the Bart and Dennis (“B&D”) series. This time we talk about the success of the Greens in the EU parliament elections, homeopathy, and postdocs.

Announcement

And we have a big announcement: On July 7th we will do a live episode on YouTube! For the show we want to play a little game. And for this to work, we need you cooperation! Send us your weirdest/funniest parascience or pseudoscience stories or soundbites! You can support either Bart or Dennis by sending your story to bart@scienceforprorgess.eu, or dennis@scienceforprogress.eu, respectively. We will randomly select a winner from all entries, who will get a free t-shirt form our merchandise store!

The overwhelming majority of PhD holders will not find a permanent position in academia. Recovering Academic is a podcast by three former scientists who left academia. In the podcast they talk about the difficulties academics face when transitioning out of the apparent safety of the Ivory Tower. As a “recovering academic” myself, I suggested a crossover episode.

This is the complete conversation with only little clean up. Recovering Academic also already published their final version here: https://recoveringacademic.net/season-3-episode-4-interview-with-dennis-eckmeier/

Hevert pharmaceuticals, a German producer of homeopathic remedies is taking legal action against Dr. Natalie Grams.

Dr. Grams is a former homeopath who one day decided to write a book about why critics of homeopathy were wrong. By studying the literature she found out, however, that homeopathy is utter humbug. Shocked, she decided to fight this dangerous quackery, which delays or even prevents the use of actual medicine, and thus can lead to preventable deaths. She is now, among other activities, part of “GWUP” a German skeptics association for the scientific study of parasciences, and she is vocal on social media. Another critic, professor Dr. Gerd Glaeske, has also faced threats of legal actions against him.