This year, I have been keeping a blog (titled "In Life and Science") about new discoveries, issues, and controversies in the field of science. Here are three of the blogs that I have posted this semester; you can see the rest of the blogs on the web page here.
One of the most significant and controversial events in the past few years is the BP oil spill in 2010. When this came up again in the news weeks ago, I knew I had to write a blog about it.
It wasn't until I started doing research on and write papers about infectious diseases this semester, that I began to understand how important funding was in any type of scientific research. When I saw that the genome of the insect that carries a "third-world disease" had been sequenced by a team of scientists (some of whom were volunteers), using very little funding, I thought it would be a good time to bring up this issue in my blog:
My psychology professor said to us on the last day of class: "Now, you know much more than you used to about hormones, neurons, and different parts of the brain. But can you see the forest for the trees; can you piece everything together and explain how the mind works? Does anyone really actually understand that?"
The answer, of course, is "no." Here is a piece of news that made me realize just how true that is: