• Question: How do you keep up to date with the latest scientific develpoments?

    Asked by to Ben on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ben White

      Ben White answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Hi @aimeegday, short answer: the internet.

      There’s a lot of useful and easy to access websites that show the latest developments across many areas of science, e.g. http://www.newscientist.com/ and for my area of work http://www.genomeweb.com/

      I also talk to other scientists A LOT and go to their lectures, and learn much about what they’re working on and also how I can apply what they’ve found to helping other scientists elsewhere with their own experiments.

      When scientists finish an experiment and want to share it with the world, they often publish it as a paper in a science journal, e.g. Nature. Before this happens though other scientists will look at the experiment, and give criticism and suggest anything else that needs to be done before the experiment is published. Reading these papers is the most official and complete way of understanding what scientists have done; as you can see exactly what they did and what their experimental data looks like. You can’t get this from the news or only talking to them, but these papers do sometimes take a long time to read and can be very complicated.

Comments