Missing Links

Time for a brief update. School of Biosciences collaborator Britt Koskella has now entered the wonderful world of blogging; she has posted quite a bit already on Nature’s Microcosm, including a paean to GoogleScholar (which I completely agree with). Although not yet featuring on her blog, a little birdie told me that Tiffany Taylor at Reading University is working on a book explaining evolution to children titled ‘Little Changes’. I’ll be reading that to my son in a couple of years for sure! Old Oxford drinking buddy Gavin Hubbard, medical biochemist turned science writer, has started a very cool blog on topics ranging from ecology to immunology: find Science Hubb here! His last post is titled ‘a dried up celibate kleptomaniac’ which is on rampant gene exchange in supposedly clonal bdelloid rotifers (not a rant about his old boss or something).

Finally, I had a meeting this week with Andy Hughes, who is a photographer working on the boundary of the coastal habitat and twenty first century consumer society (he has other interests as well; for instance publishing a book on Jack Russel terriers this month). Andy also teaches at nearby Truro and Penwith College and will hopefully be able to persuade some of his students to visit our lab for photography projects next year, that would be very cool indeed! He kindly gave me a copy of his book ‘Dominant Wave Theory‘, which features his photographs of trash on beaches in Cornwall, Scotland and the US. The pictures are highly saturated, with the often colorful pieces of washed up plastics sharply contrasting with a dramatic backdrop of sand, sky and sea.