At the time of writing, known Covid-19 stands at around 1.3 million known cases with deaths passing 75,000 over the world. Quarantines lasting for weeks have disrupted work and put many researchers from our Sparrho Community into an unusual position. How did the restrictions affect your fellow scientists? Read the third part of our series personal accounts.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused sorrow for lost loved ones and a major shock worldwide. It is forcing people to re-think how they work while staying at home or practising ‘social distancing’. We’ve asked researchers from Sparrho’s Community to share their stories. Read the second part here.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused sorrow for lost loved ones and a major shock worldwide. It is forcing people to re-think how they work while staying at home or practising ‘social distancing’. We’ve asked researchers from Sparrho’s Community to share their stories. Read the first part here.

Sparrho awards £300 to PhD students and postdocs to attend an academic conference of their choice. Today we introduce our first winner of the Sparrho Early Career Researcher Prize in 2020 — congratulations to Ibikunle Olaleru! — Our warmest congrats to Ibikunle Olaleru who will bag our £300 conference grant which will help him to present at the 12th World Rabbit Congress 2020 between 1st — 3rd July 2020 in Nantes, France. 🇫🇷

Making microbes gobble up pollution and standing up for science — these are just some of the things that drive our October Researcher Prize winner. By the looks of it, Michael Eze must have cracked a secret energy efficiency formula. How else could one explain him working on a ‘dual PhD’, playing football and being a family man? — Michael Eze knows how to nurture his scientific capital: our Sparrho Prize has got him to the annual convention of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, where he bagged the Carlos Walter M. Campos Memorial Award for Best International Student Paper.

More than a hundred years after the publication of Einstein’s seminal theory of relativity, scientists are starting to question its universal validity. — Did you know? Albert Einstein, often regarded as “The Father of Modern Physics” won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the photoelectric effect (helping develop quantum theory and), not his influential theory of general relativity . Einstein’s presence in almost every branch of physics marks his versatile genius, but is his standing unshakeable?

Sparrho awards £500 to PhD students and postdocs to attend an academic conference of their choice. Today we introduce our September winner for the Sparrho Early Career Researcher Prize — congratulations to Lap Hing Chi (Leo)! — Leo will present at the 9th Barossa Meeting 2019 — Cell Signalling in Cancer Medicine from 12th — 15th November 2019 in Barossa Valley, Adelaide, Australia. 🇦🇺 Leo is a PhD student at Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute, Australia, studying human genetics and how they affect our chances of developing a disorder. He convinced the Sparrho jury with his pinboard submission:

Earlier this year, a publisher for open access journals came under fire when it was “fined $50 Million after scamming thousands of scientists”. This publisher is not an isolated case but belongs to a group known as ‘Predatory Journals’. What are their practises and how are they damaging the academic publishing industry? — Establishing a competitive publication record is an important measure of academic success for most early career academics’. In addition to being an important metric amongst peers, universities often use publications to evaluate academic researchers’ performance and asses job candidates and applications for internal promotions. …

Almost 80 million tonnes of marine animals are taken from the ocean annually for consumption. Global demand for seafood continues to increase, but it is stretching the ocean’s resources. Scientists estimate that as much as one-third of fished stocks are exploited at biologically unsustainable levels. Which means there is a strong urge to monitor fishing on a global scale. — A necessary first step towards improving the sustainability of fisheries is improving our knowledge of global fisheries; for instance, who is doing the fishing, where they are operating, and how much and what species they catch.