Heather Doran

Baroness Susan Greenfield will be speaking this evening at the British Science Festival 2012 in Aberdeen about the 21 st century mind. Her talk, ‘The human brain adapts to the environment in which it is placed. Today's cyber world is offering a new type of environment and the brain could therefore be changing in correspondingly new ways. We need to try and forsee what these changes, be they positive or negative, may be. Then we can minimise the threats and harness the opportunities. Join Susan Greenfield to explore the 21st century brain.’ Baroness Susan Greenfield is a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, a member of the House of Lords, a writer and a broadcaster. She has, over the past 3 or 4 years shared her opinion that digital technology is having an impact on our brains. She has been associated with stories that Facebook and other social websites could be causing damage to our, and childrens brains. These are bold views and messages that the media ha

*warning* this is a self-indulgent blog post. I am suffering from a large bout of PhD thesis 'tunnel vision'. All I can think about at the moment is the massive amount of work I have to do in such a short space of time. When you have three years of work, a computer full of data and a head full of thoughts and ideas... where do you start? The worry of unemployment also likes to creep in... I don't have a job lined up for when I finish (yet, but there are some things in the pipeline). My aim is to be mostly finished by October. My last payment from my PhD will be in August. My brain starts panicking about all of these things at random times throughout the day, and then I can't get anything done. It took me ages to get writing. I had a plan, but I still found it completely overwhelming.  I'm usually someone that forms a plan quickly and then gets going and I wasn't. So I started getting stressed about that. The hard work has been done already. I know I h

I was lucky enough to attend the Scottish University Life Sciences Alliance Young Scientists' Event in Edinburgh on the 19th and 20th of March. There really were some excellent and useful talks, from presentation skills (including how to use pauses and silence correctly) to possible new therapies for inherited skin diseases. On the second day there was a debate about open access publishing. I tweeted the debate and have collated them using storify. [&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;<span class="goog-spellcheck-word" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: yellow; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">lt</span>;a <span class="goog-spellcheck-word" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color