Category: Biology Week

Can we outsmart malaria? A question of tactics

Dara Annett is a PhD student in the Deu group in the Department of Parasitology, currently at the NIMR until the move to the Crick Institute in 2016 Malaria is one of humankind’s oldest battles. Our understanding has increased rapidly in the last century but there are still around 200 million cases reported per year and more than 600,000 deaths [1]. When I was applying for PhDs as a Chemistry graduate I had no specialist biology background, but I knew that I wanted to put my skills to use in a field that had an impact on global health and disease. My work involves identifying new drug targets in the malaria parasite. Although this is very early in the process of drug discovery, I know that it is working towards translational research. This excites me and will keep me coming in every day for 4…

Sometimes you need your own space – DIY for solitary bees

In advance of Professor Adam Hart’s 24 hour lecturethon, David Urry from the Society of Biology shares his experiences of building a bee hotel. I am not the most practically minded person in the world, but I do enjoy a bit of D.I.Y. After coming across an old picture frame and backing board in the garage, I did what any amateur naturalist (and even more amateur handy man) would do, and decided to convert it into a bee hotel for solitary bees and insect overwintering site. There are over 200 species of solitary bee in the UK, most of which go largely unnoticed to the untrained eye. Normally slightly smaller than their social cousins, they are no less active and ubiquitous and are common visitors to gardens and parks all over the UK. Within the 200 species found, a variety of life history strategies are represented as different species go…

Behavioural Genetics: who are you?

Dr Claire Hastings introduces the field of Behavioural Genetics ahead of the Royal Institution debate entitled: “The good, the bad, and the genetically predetermined” on the 15th October, during Biology Week 2013. Your genome contains all the instructions for building you. This includes genes that affect your behaviour: from learning and memory, eating and sleeping or mating behaviour and personality. Within the human population there is variation in these genes, resulting in the behavioural differences we observe in each other. Genes that affect behaviour are a huge part of what makes you, you. They often provide you with more of a sense of self than the genes involved in your physical appearance such as height or eye colour. So who are you? Are you the simply sum total of your genetic material? Is your behaviour predetermined by your genes? Or is there more to it? Scientists have been working to answer these questions for…

Chewing off her wings – the queen ant’s rite of passage

By Rebecca Nesbit from the Society of Biology There has been a long, slow build up to flying ant day this year. The first sightings of winged black garden ants came early, with hundreds of records for the flying ant survey already in by the third week of July. The first major flying ant day, however, was Friday 26th July, though even this turned out to be a prelude to the mass emergence on Thursday 1st August. For me, this protracted spell of flying ant sightings has been an opportunity to witness some fascinating behaviour as part of one of the summer’s greatest spectacles. On 26th July, I was excited to find some flying ants on the outside of the Society of Biology office. The tiny males were in search of fat new queens to mate with – I even saw two males trying simultaneously to mate with one queen. The next stage of…

Ecological adventures during Biology Week

As we start to plan Biology Week 2013 here at the Society of Biology we take inspiration from some of the successes of 2012. Here Nick O’Connor, a teacher at Highcliffe School, describes his A level field course in Dorset The Year 13 A level Biologists spent a superb 3 days along the Jurassic Coast on the Isle of Purbeck. This was a great chance to study outdoor biology with wellies on! We arrived at with great expectations at Leeson House Field Studies Centre which is set in an outstanding environment nestling in the Purbeck Hills overlooking Swanage Bay. We were met by our expert Biology tutor, Mr Mike Gould, and he took us through the field trip itinerary. We spent the first day looking at woodland ecology in the grounds of Leeson House. We also studied the abundance and distribution of lichens (which are a symbiotic relationship between an alga and…

Is panda PR a good idea?

by Rebecca Nesbit, Press Officer, Society of Biology Panda conservation is not ‘greenwash’ read the headline of BBC Nature’s thought-provoking write-up of the Biology Week debate ‘should we save the panda’. This referred to the evening’s extensive discussion about the use (and misuse) of pandas in conservation PR. Whether or not you think it is important to make popular animals a conservation priority, the belief that pandas attract more conservation resources than they use is a common reason for voting that we should indeed save the panda. As poster boys, charismatic species can attract money and increase the profile of conservation (and conservation organisations). It is surprisingly complicated to determine whether, overall, the panda brings in more money for conservation than it uses. Zoos raise money for conservation in the wild, but would people who paid for entry into a zoo still come if there were no pandas to…

Podcast: should we save the panda?

by Rebecca Nesbit With just five days to go until the Biology Week debate, ‘Do we need pandas? Choosing which species to save’, the votes on the Society of Biology website poll are swinging in favour of the panda. To help me decide which way to vote, I produced this podcast in which I interview three conservationists about conservation and the choices we make – everything from controlling non-native species to protecting them. I will be live tweeting as @Society_Biology from the event on Monday night using the hashtag #pandadebate and will be taking questions to put to the panel. If you have any questions in advance, please add them to the comments below. I’d also be very interested to hear your views on any of the issues I raised in the podcast, and those debated under my last blog post. My podcast guests were: Mark Avery, Zara Gladman and Matthew Hatchwell

The Everyday Brain

by Zara Gladman On Friday 19th October 2012, schools, universities and individuals across the country will attempt to set a record for the World’s Largest Memory Game. Guided by neurobiologist Dr Daniela Peukert, I stuck on my thinking cap and took a journey around this highly complex organ . . . We all have one. Einstein’s was smaller than average. The scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz pined for one. I am of course talking about that squidgy, tofu-like lump of “grey matter”, encased in your skull: the brain. This amazing organ controls just about everything you do, from making a cup of tea to falling in love. The biggest part of the brain, the cerebrum, can be broadly divided into two regions called “hemispheres”. Generally, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body and vice versa. The right hemisphere is also associated with functions like creativity and…

Flying ant day is back

Submit your flying ant sightings! After the excitement of flying ant day, which happened in the last week of July in most of the UK, there has been a sudden encore and swarms of flying ants were sighted around the UK on 8th August. In some cases at least it appears that the same nests have produced a second batch of males and new queens. Thank you to everyone who has filled in our flying ant survey – we have had over 5000 records so far which will be fascinating data for analysis. Even if you submitted sightings previously your results from this week will be just as valuable as those from July. We will present the results in October during Biology Week. This sound track to this quick video explains about flying ants, and my last blog post answers some more questions.