Life Beyond the Beaker

RowAroundScotland is an expedition in coastal rowing boats around Scotland as part of Scotland's Year of Coasts & Waters 20/21. As Sue explains, "t he pandemic forced the RowAroundScotland to become Virtual in 2020, but the real circumnavigation, take two, will now happen in 2021.  The row must go on!" Check it out here !  One sunny day before lockdown and before Christmas I headed out on a skiff with the Fentons! Throughout my time at school in Wales (yep shock I am Welsh but have a very English accent haha), I competitively rowed. I rowed in 8 seaters, 4 seaters, double, and single rowing boats - there was a point in my life where we were training 6 times a week to try and make it to Wales! So, since stopping rowing when I left for Uni I have always wanted to try skiff rowing on the open sea - very different from rowing on a wee river in Wales. I never did pursue rowing at University because there was a rule that you were not allowed to drink during the week, I quic...

  Here Rachel is explaining the type of Airboat that she uses as a wetlands ecologist in the US! I recently had a great chat with Rachel Villani from  Louisiana! We had made contact through Twitter as I had seen back in September that she was doing podcasts on Antarctica and wanted to speak to people that have worked in the field. One of my major goals whilst being within the science world is to communicate what I do and hopefully inspire others. I also think that within the scary online world that there are some fantastic tools out there, one of them being Twitter if you use it in the right way. I use Twitter to keep up to date with the latest science, policies, ideas, and also network. Zoom is also a great tool to have a virtual meeting and Rachel uses it to record her podcasts.  Storytellers of STEMM is the podcast Rachel hosts, " since January 2020. Everyone has a story, and these are the stories of the people in STEMM - their successes, career paths, research, field...

In the news, people are finally talking about microplastics. Talking about it and having knowledge about what needs to change is a start and scientists need to gather and share data about what they find. This usually takes the form of a research paper, published through online journals such as Marine Pollution Bulletin, they all have a very strict format. Especially on et al. layouts... The other thing is, *shock* its not just principal investigators or people with PhDs that publish papers as a second author or as a primary author! If you want to you can find a way...the science world is very restrictive, especially for technicians but you just need to find a way to make those barricades work for you and your institute, which at the time was BAS and it didn't even cross their mind to question whether I should be publishing! I was stuck on a ship for 2 months with the transport aquarium so I did have lots of time to pull this all together. Here it is! When I first started at BAS, I...

Over the summer of this year RowAroundScotland , a project run by the Scottish Coastal Rowing Association and being support by 2020 Coasts & Waters was meant to be happening as rowing clubs prepare their boats across Scotland to get ready to row around Scotland, each doing their own leg of the route. "RowAround Scotland 2020 is a relay in open rowing boats around the coast of Scotland. It is organised by Scottish Coastal Rowing Association whose 70 member clubs will all take part, joining up their communities and promoting Scotland’s wonderful coastline and waters along the way." "In 2020, Scotland celebrates its coasts and waters with a year-long programme of events and activities which will shine a spotlight on these vital elements of our landscape." This is the route that the boats were going to take around Scotland! Each leg was going to be completed by the local rowing groups. Yep if you haven't already thought what I...

For anyone that's been following me since Antarctica, then my paper on microplastics around Rothera research station has been published...you can read it here:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X18303977 Any questions let me know. https://www.bas.ac.uk/project/impact-of-plastic-in-the-polar-regions/