Science

17/07/2015

Want to learn more about the impacts of fishing on fishermen and the marine environment? Got half an hour? Listen to our new podcast, free to listen and download https://soundcloud.com/the-british-library/fishing-and-marine-protection?in=the-british-library/sets/science

What are the impacts of fishing on the marine environment? How do policies such as marine protected areas and fishing quotas affect sea-life and fishermen? Must conservation and consumption always be

29/06/2015

If you missed TalkScience 29 you can now catch up on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yU0k3npt_g

With an ever increasing appetite for fish how can we balance our daily demand with a sustainable supply? Ten per cent of the world's population depend on the...

16/06/2015

Continuing our fishy theme, this week Peter Spooner explores the Library collections to learn about the history of fishing, from dolphins and ancient poisons to medieval mismanagement of English rivers http://bit.ly/1SjQ6U3

Our next TalkScience event will explore the impacts of fishing on the marine realm. But how long have humankind been fishing for food? Peter Spooner delves into the British Library collections to find out.

08/06/2015

New blog now online from our current Science Policy intern http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/science/2015/06/the-ocean.html introducing the next TalkScience event: Fishing and Marine Protection.

Peter Spooner dives into the issues of seafood sustainability in advance of our upcoming TalkScience event on 23rd June.

19/03/2015

We may not end up with the best weather for observing the solar eclipse tomorrow, and if we don't you could always plan a trip to see one somewhere with slightly better weather! This Solar Eclipse Explorer allows you to pick a city and a century to see when the next solar eclipses will be.

See you in Alice Springs July 2037!

Lastly, a reminder not to look directly at the sun. This leaflet has some good advice on safely watching an eclipse: http://bit.ly/1xeSVjg

This page is part of NASA's Solar Eclipse Explorer. It can compute the local circumstances for every solar eclipse visible from a city for any century from -1499 to 3000 (1500 BCE to 3000 CE).

08/03/2015

This International Women's Day, lets take time out to celebrate the female inventors that have made our lives that little bit safer and easier.

Do these women inspire you to get inventing? If not, perhaps there's another female inventor who does - let us know who and why in the comments!

These female inventors got busy at the drawing board and transformed the way we live at home, at work and many places in between.

06/02/2015

In June last year, we held a DataCite workshop hosted by the University of Glasgow. We've now turned our speaker's use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for rainforest data into a video and printed case study. You can still find a short summary of that event here. Our thanks go...

29/01/2015

The British Library Voices of Science collection features in depth interviews with scientists, and these clips relate to soil - well, it is the end of the first month of the UN's International Year of Soils!

Listen to scientists talking about soil, and the shells, bones and fossils that it contains, as rich sources of evidence for scientists about the history of past climates.

22/12/2014

The last few working days before Christmas are always a good excuse to catch up on the BMJ Christmas articles and some slightly tongue-in-cheek research. So what interesting things have we learned from them this year?
1. Playing Wii could be bad for your health (http://bit.ly/13vt5cv)
2. But being a character in an animated children’s film could be considerably worse (http://bit.ly/1HoV0HW)
3. As could being a man (http://bit.ly/1t0BqAZ)
4. The ice bucket challenge was as transmissible as H1N1 (http://bit.ly/13qOGm4)
5. The quality of acronyms for clinical trials is decreasing over time (http://bit.ly/1E25hxF)
6. Anaesthesiologists tend to underestimate how long a procedure will take (http://bit.ly/1wdUMwT)
7. But for those longer-than-expected operations, surgical staff can use a suction canister to amplify the music on their phone (http://bmj.co/1xaOEwt)

Editorials Christmas 2014: Editorial Musical theatre BMJ 2014; 349 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g7504 (Published 19 December 2014) Cite this as: BMJ 2014;349:g7504 Article Related content Metrics Responses Peer review Alex James Nicholls, specialty registrar, trauma and orthopaedics, Carol O’M…

19/12/2014

Francis Owtram explores how Indian Ocean tsunami research is being enhanced by the Qatar Digital Library (QDL), a new bilingual, online portal of archival material relating to Gulf history and Arabic science. This is the first post in a series about the potential of the QDL to provide easier access.…

01/12/2014

Unfortunately we’re not running a science advent calendar on Facebook this year. But if you’re still looking for a daily dose of science in the run up to Christmas, why not try these alternatives:
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Festive Calendar: http://bit.ly/LSHTMadvent2014
Max Planck Institute: http://bit.ly/MPGadvent2014
Geological Society of London: http://bit.ly/GSLadvent2014 (Daily advent blog posts!)
Cosmic Genome: http://bit.ly/CosGenAdvent2014
Galaxy Zoo: http://bit.ly/GZadvent2014

Check out the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine's festive calendar!

21/11/2014

You might have seen Lunar Mission One in the news recently. They are aiming to crowd-fund a UK run lunar lander mission. As well as trying to fund the science, projects such as this may inspire more engagement in science by actually allowing people to make a recognised contribution to that work.

Would you forgo takeaways or your morning coffee shop coffee for a month to help fund space science? What science would you give these things up to fund? Share your ideas in the comments!

Lunar Mission One: the most inspirational mission to the Moon since the Apollo landings, and your chance to reserve your place in space