As I wrote about last year, the BBC filmed some of my PhD work on the babblers. This is forming part of a new documentary series called World’s Sneakiest Animals (if you click the link, the picture of the camera man on the dune is at the KRR on big dune). The first episode is being aired on Christmas day, so get tuned in for some wildlife adventures with Chris Packham – BBC Two 6.30pm.
 
Given the titles of the episodes I think that the babblers will not be taking centre stage on Christmas day but instead will flap onto our screens, in their typically pathetic flying style, in episode 2 on the 7th of Jan. I can’t wait to see one of my experiments recreated on TV, just wish I’d been able to be out there when the filming was done.

​Here is the episode breakdown:
 
Episode 1 - Staying Alive - Christmas Day, BBC Two, 6.30pm
Episode 2 - The Hunger Game - 7th January, BBC Two, 8pm
Episode 3 - Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks - 14th January, BBC Two, 8pm
 
Staying Alive will then be repeated on 21st January.
 
www.bbc.co.uk/sneakiestanimals #SneakiestAnimals 

The smell of mulled wine is lingering in the air, the sight of shoppers moving swiftly between stores with looks of terror on their faces has become a familiar one and Mariah Carey has been stuck in your head for weeks: IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME!!

This time of year we frequently think of gifts for loved ones but there is another aspect of many people's live (well that of scientists) that often remains over looked: their department library. Fear not! I have a great suggest for a couple of awesome Christmas gifts this year.

First, the new edition of Cooperative Breeding in Vertebrates by Koenig and Dickinson. This revamped classic has new chapters on such wondrous species as pied babblers (possibly the greatest avian species to evolve!). This new tome has been upgraded from Stacey and Koenig's original that solely looked at birds, from what I have heard it also includes meerkats and banded mongoose - fun for all the taxa. So order a copy now, or maybe get your department to treat themselves as its cover price is $140: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/life-sciences/animal-behaviour/cooperative-breeding-vertebrates-studies-ecology-evolution-and-behavior

My second suggestion is my favourite book from undergrad: An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology. This is the 4th edition of this classic text book, although some of the fruity terminology from the 1st edition has disappeared (sneaker males  are no longer sneaky f**kers!) it has grown to be an all encompassing joy to read. Plus I have  picture in this book, unfortunately the chapter's author Mike Cant attributed it to Alex Thornton, but c'est la vie. This is much cheaper at only £39.95, so you can buy this for the library for sure: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405114169.html

Look out for Tim Clutton-Brock's book on Mammal Societies in the new year, a wild romp through evolution in the furriest of taxa!

​I hope you all have a merry Christmas and don't spend to much time on R!

 
Everyone in the UK seemed to get very excited about the first British astronaut, Tim Peake. I feel bad, but space just doesn't fill me with the sense of wonder and excitement and so I just couldn’t get into the fanfare surrounding the launch. There is also the oddity that although Tim Peake is the first British astronaut, he isn’t actually the first Briton in space: that honour goes to Helen Sharman. I’m not trying to put a downer on the whole scientific endeavour, but it just doesn’t float my boat but I’m sure that Brian Cox is going crazy about it!
 
Some good news this week about nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and Europe’s ability of reducing its emissions. NO2 is not very good for public health and increases the amount of ozone (O3) at ground level (it’s great when it’s in the upper atmosphere but not so great when we can breathe it in).
Results of tracking of NO2 production have recently been published, and although the overall trend isn’t great at least it show a significant drop in emissions from Europe and the US. I’m trying to see the positives instead of the negatives!

For my undergrad thesis I worked on Chalkhill Blue butterflies at a wildlife reserve in Bedfordshire. Like most people growing up in Britain my experience of butterflies was mainly seeing the odd Cabbage White float over my garden. But the reserve where I did my research was teaming with 10s of species and huge number of these magical insects. Walk along a hedge row and it would erupt in front of you with clouds of blues, oranges, yellow and greens as the butterflies swarmed around you. Those experiences make the news the 76% of Britain’s butterflies are in decline very saddening. Some species and some areas are doing fine but for the majority of these enigmatic species the trend is downwards. Chris Packham spoke well on the Today Programme (01:20:38) about the possible reasons for the decline and the need for research into why it’s happening and how we can stop it.

Darwin's finches are one of the most emblematic images of the voyage of the Beagle and are an integral part of the story that has grown up around how Darwin discovered the Theory of Natural Selection. The diversity of the beaks of these birds has become part of the fabric of biological history. I first heard about the issues facing Darwin’s finches while listening to an episode of Radiolab: LINK (it was part of a larger episode on the Galapagos). These iconic birds are facing a huge threat from invasive flies that lay their eggs in their nest’s and whose larvae attack the nostrils of the finch nestlings. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Darmouth have been studying the medium ground finch and modelling how these parasites will impact the population and the results are not good: they could be extinct within 50 years. But the models also show that if you reduce the risk of infestation occurring, and the researchers suggest using cotton soaked in pesticide that the birds can incorporate into their nests. But in a cool twist this new parasite-host relationship has resulted in a change in behaviour in a closely related species with increased begging rate from nestlings when parasitized, resulting in them being fed more and more likely to survive!
 
A couple of other really cool science news stories this week: hummingbird heat loss and elephants and earthquakes.

​I’ve recently started as a science teaching assistant, I’m deciding on whether teaching is something I’m any good at and a career that I’d like to pursue. But in my first few weeks I have noticed something about how the students view and understand the information they are taught. There is no distinction between the way they view science and highly subjective subjects like English and RE. Student’s view someone’s opinion on why Shakespeare used a certain turn of phrase in a sonnet in the same way that they view atomic structure. To them both are equally valid, just someone’s idea. I think this stems from a lack of understanding of what science is and how it works. So in the rest of this blog I’m going to give a lay explanation of how science works. For those of you who are academics this will skirt over issues about whether peer review is the best way or that negative results are under reported and published. The idea is just to lay out that science is a systematic and self-correcting way of understanding the world.
 
Firstly, most science is done by conducting experiments. Researchers will get an idea from observing things in nature or from what we already know about how the world works and want to test if their idea is right. These ideas are hypotheses. This is done by changing one variable and seeing what effect this has, but also comparing it to when nothing is changed (called a control). This allows the scientists to see the impact this variable, be is temperature in a reaction or how much food a father blue tit has available to feed his offspring, has on the system. The researchers the record their results and write them up in a scientific paper, usually structured: abstract (summary), introduction (why we’re looking at this and what similar things have been found before), methods (how we ran our experiment), results (what we found) and discussion (how we interpret what we’ve found).
 
Secondly, the scientists will submit their research to an academic journal in the hope it gets published. There work will be sent off to experts in their field of research, be it astrophysics, marine biology or material science. These experts will then look at how the experiment was done: was it a careful and well-designed experiment? Did they use a big enough sample size? Did they use the right statistics to determine if what they found was statistically significant? They will also look at the discussion to see if the researchers interpreted their findings correct or if they are claiming to have found things that their results do not support. This process determines if this bit of research becomes published or not. These are the types of science that you hear about in newspapers and on the TV. This is cutting edge research and you’ll learn about it at university but not in school.
 
Thirdly, cutting edge research is great and it is the stuff that breaks new ground but it isn’t always correct. To really know if something that has been found is real it needs to be repeated by other researchers. This is where science differs from other subjects. Experiments are repeated by other researchers and published and their results are compared to those of the first. Gradually knowledge about something builds up and something called a meta-analysis can be done. This involves looking at all of the research in a specific area and finding out what it all means, because comparing a large amount of studies is more accurate than just using one to decide if a scientific hypothesis is true. Often initially exciting and extreme finding are tempered, or they can be found to be untrue and in this was science is self-correcting. However, if all the repeated experiments show the initial idea to be true then it will change from a hypothesis to a theory. Theory is a term that is often misunderstood outside of science because it sounds like it’s just an idea but a scientific theory is a In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses [1]. Theories are the end point of science not the beginning.
 
Fourthly, and finally, these new areas of science are taught in schools. This can take a long time and typically depend on what the government in your country decides is important. But before it gets to the school text book science has been rigorously tested and shown to be repeatable and true in a way that someone’s opinion on why a certain ruler in the 19th century decided to do x or y just simply haven’t. I am not advocating for C.P. Snow’s two cultures or trying to devalue arts subjects, as they are crucial to education and provide a form of thinking that is critical to learn. I also believe that children should be taught to have a critical mind and ask questions of everything they are taught. However, when students are taught evolution by natural selection or atomic theory they shouldn’t be do I believe this, as they should of a literary critic’s opinion of Wordsworth, but instead how did scientists find this out and what is the evidence? They are subtly different but crucially different questions. There is also beauty in the scientific method!