Finally on the way

Following a few hiccups that delayed the start of the expedition, the Indigo V and its crew left Cape Town bright and early on May, 17th. Sailing shifts and work shifts have been organised (Martin got the lucky pick of the first 3-6am shift!!), the equipment is safely tied down and most importantly the food supplies are plentiful!
Let's hope there will not be too many teething issues with the instruments when the boat is actually out of the calm waters of the harbour, but all the initial tests sails conducted have already sorted a few problems so it should be plain sailing until Mauritius.

Who wants to organise the food?

Best not to have vertigo

Voyage Preparations – Cape Town

Cape Town is a pretty amazing place to start a research voyage. The food is fantastic so I have been filling up my quota of vitamins and minerals, from amazing full breakfasts with Boerewors sausages and fluffy scrambled eggs to thin crust pizza and sourdough smoked salmon sandwiches.

Apart from pre-fuelling the body, we have been hard at work to prepare the yacht, from the sails, engines, supplies and sheets to the batteries and electrical systems that will support our science equipment while we are under sail power.

We have one more day of intense preparations but we are now happy with the safety systems and backups. Just have to do the laundry, fill the fuel tanks and clear customs before sailing tomorrow.

Martin

The Marina in Cape Town

A lazy seal soaking up the sun

Calling all Evolutionary Genomics Scientists

For any of you who may be interested, Macquarie University Department of Biology is advertising for an Evolutionary Genomics faculty position: http://jobs.mq.edu.au/cw/en/job/492822/lecturersenior-lecturer-in-biological-sciences-evolutionary-genomics
To translate for non-Australians, a lvl B/C faculty position is approximately the equivalent of an Assistant Professor in US terms.

The architectural highlight of Macquarie Uni- the new library

All aboard

Our resident sailor Dr Martin Ostrowski has escaped the laboratory once again to take part in an exciting adventure on the high seas. Dr Federico Lauro, an ARC DECRA fellow at UNSW and accomplished sailor, transformed the delivery of a yacht from Cape Town to Singapore into an amazing oceanographic research sampling expedition that will explore marine microbes and their involvement in some of the major global processes throughout some of the most under-sampled waters of the globe.
The Indigo V, a Nautor Swan 61, or for the relatively non-nautical people like me: an 18m sail boat, will accommodate several consecutive 7-strong crews of scientists from around the world during each of the four legs of the transect: Cape Town - Mauritius - Maldives - Phuket - Singapore.

The voyage has already attracted quite a bit of press coverage in some of the major Australian newspapers (Sydney Morning Herald) and radio (ABC). The work and adventures of the sailing scientists will also be recorded in a documentary being filmed on board the ship along the way!

A Live blog and some more details on the research voyage can be found at the following link.

Come back on this blog too for some updates from the escapee.

Indigo V

The New Science

Well, I'm running about 3 weeks behind on my blogging, things have continued to be a little crazy and hectic here. But, the combination of science and gaming has provided the motivational energy to post again. We had dinner last night with my friends Fraser and Lencia. After an excellent dessert of berry and rhubarb cobbler (mmmm, thanks Fraser!), we tried out a new boardgame called "The New Science". My friend Fraser had supported the funding of the game through kickstarter. For a game that had been funded through crowd funding, I was very impressed with the high production values of the game, better looking than many other games I've played. My one criticism was that my dementia-addled brain kept confusing the little square block pieces with the ever so slightly larger square block pieces that were used for a completely different purpose.

Anyway, in the New Science, you play as one of the great scientific thinkers of the 17th century. And science in the 17the century clearly was just as competitive and cutthroat as it is today. You have to beat your fellow scientists to publishing your significant discoveries. Each turn you get 3 actions, where you can either research a scientific theory, experiment to prove your theory is correct, publish your theory to gain prestige (whoever has the most prestige wins the game), gain influence (by schmoozing government, religious, scientific or industry figures), take a random event, or rest. Deciding when the publish was crucial, you don't want to get scooped, but on the other hand, do you want to let your scientific competitors get a free ride on your research? So, pretty much just like real life. Resting at the right time to build up your energy for important scientific work was also crucial. Overall, we all thought it was a very fun game. The irony of relaxing from the stress of science by playing a game simulating the stress of science provided additional entertainment.

I played as Gottfried Leibnitz, my girlfriend played as Isaac Newton, resulting in an animated discussion about who really invented calculus!

It feels like its been 500 years

I've survived (barely) this season of grant writing. Our four National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants were submitted a couple of weeks ago. Although I was ready for a vacation by that point, we also participated with an American team on an NIH Center for Translational Medicine application, which was submitted a few days ago. Now, all we have to do is wait six months and keep fingers, toes, eyes, etc crossed.

In the meantime, an interesting paper came out in the journal Nature, and got some press coverage at least in Australia, for instance this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, on the topic of scientific grant writing.To quote the SMH article:

"Australian scientists spent more than 500 years' worth of time preparing research funding applications for the country's largest grant scheme in 2012, according to a survey by Queensland researchers.
And as only one-fifth of proposals to the federal government's National Health and Medical Research Council were successful, scientists wasted the equivalent of four centuries diverted from their research."

At the moment it certainly feels like I've spent 500 years writing grant applications, and certainly I've done little else for the last three months. It does raise interesting questions- is this the best use of scientist's time and effort? Is it even the best way of distributing resources for research? One of my favourite stories on this topic is how in the 1990s Craig Venter and colleagues submitted a grant to sequence the first ever bacterial genome (Haemophilus influenzae) to the NIH. It scored the lowest possible score in the grant scoring scheme and received reviews saying that the grant was ridiculous and that the proposed work was impossible. They then went ahead and got private funding for this work, succeeded, published the genome in Science, and started the genomics revolution. An example of how truly innovative research is highly unlikely to be funded under current grant schemes, which tend to support incremental scientific advances.

Anyway, I'm going to stop here for the moment, but hope to revisit this topic in a subsequent blog post.

We're trying to avoid this situation

Oh oh oh .... caught in a bad project

Last week saw the submission of another grant (ARC Discovery Grant). Continuing on with the need for humour while surviving grant writing, this post highlights one of my favourite videos on YouTube. Bad Project is a parody of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance. I think many scientists can relate to the situation in this video. In fact, I like to say one my most important career skills was the ability to avoid "Research Projects from Hell".

Anyway this parody song not only has surprisingly good production values but has great lyrics, I always find myself singing-
Blot, Blot Western Baby, Figure One will be Amazing.
Blot, Blot Western Baby, Transfer- this exposure's hazy
Blot, Blot Western Baby, Got no bands this shit is crazy

I also love the box of eppendorf tubes labelled in Thai, reminds of a scientist I used to work with who labelled everything he worked on in Hebrew.