Economists listen to Ecologists: On Biology at the World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum has a tradition of bringing together a sprinkling of academics and entrepreneurial innovators to mix with business and policy elites at… Read more »
Penelope Austin
Deputy Editor at BMC Biology
Penelope left the research bench to work as a scientific editor in the last century, and is already thinking about what kind of world her grandchild will grow up in.
Latest posts by Penelope Austin (see all)
- Economists listen to Ecologists: On Biology at the World Economic Forum - 9th March 2018
- The secret language of behavior - 31st January 2017
- Restoring a lost microbiome to a model worm - 12th May 2016
The secret language of behavior
Pioneers of ethology Tinbergen and Lorenz relied on observations made with their own eyes and computed by their own brains when they proposed that animal… Read more »
Restoring a lost microbiome to a model worm
A lost dimension of life is being restored to the laboratory worm Caenorhabditis elegans. With the promise of building yet further on its already resounding… Read more »
Astrocytes and the secret of sleep
Astrocytes are star-shaped glial cells of the central nervous system. They support neurons in many ways but do they have a role in helping the brain to sleep?… Read more »
An update on the Earth Microbiome Project
When BMC Biology launched its iconic image we acknowledged the extreme artistic licence of portraying selected vertebrate phyla pictorially while whole… Read more »
Our Medical Future
Health and healthcare were a prominent theme of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, and one of the first sessions took a look into our medical… Read more »
The remarkable and still mysterious cancer resistance of blind mole rats
Blind mole rats (Spalax spp) are extraordinary rodents that spend most of their lives underground, digging in poorly ventilated tunnels. Their ability to… Read more »
Antibiotic resistance – Can we avert the apocalypse?
The problem of antibiotic resistance, recently described as “apocalyptic” by Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer of the UK, is getting worse and cannot be… Read more »
A quantitative map of immune cells in mosquitoes
Inside insects there is an open cavity called the hemocoel, in which fluid and cells known as hemocytes circulate due to the pumping of a heart. The hemocytes … Read more »
The anatomy of birdsong
Songbirds learn to sing in the same way that human infants learn to talk: by imitating other members of their species. Their songs are important in… Read more »