The Academic Writing Platform for the Middle Common Room.
We have a vaccine for COVID-19. Finally this pandemic could be over with. Hurrah! Late last year, Pfizer, Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sinovac, and other developers announced their successful endeavours in producing effective vaccines against COVID-19. Despite differences in methods and production techniques, all claimed that their vaccine is over 60% effective, qualifying Read more…
What is my research about? Let me start from afar! We want to build a quantum computer. Why bother? Well, would you like to be able to easily design enzymes making plastic degrade safer and faster? Or to speed up drug design by orders of magnitude? Or to engineer materials Read more…
Development of sanitation and infrastructure would undoubtedly help control enteric fever in low and middle income countries (LMICs), however changes on this scale are long and expensive and therefore inaccessible.
English is a strange language in insisting on the addition of the verb ‘do’ to form the question, when our cousins in Europe seem to do quite well without. When studying in Padua, I learned that there was an example of this ‘do-support’ (with the verb fà, meaning ‘do’) in Read more…
If you enter the keywords ‘mindfulness’ or ‘meditation’ in PubMed, a large database for biomedical research, you will retrieve over 20,000 references. This may come as no surprise for some, who have noticed that the term mindfulness is everywhere in the media. However, the investigation of secular mindfulness, which involves Read more…
A travel guide and a (cognitive) map: a neuroscientific fable from a world of open borders Have you ever gone into a different room, only to forget what you were doing? Have you ever been bewildered while travelling somewhere very different, or perhaps while studying or attempting something new? Perhaps Read more…
As an Educationalist, I have had to endure questions from non-specialists that allow me to prove that I am not training to become a teacher, but I am trying to provide new insights that challenge the way teachers do the teaching. Hence, my interest pedagogy, but more specifically in critical Read more…
Art is a complex concept to define. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, art is: ‘The expression or application of creative human skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power’. The definition provided Read more…
As humans living on one fragile planet, how are we to view one another, our diversities and complexities, and where are the vocabularies that help us flesh out a full-bodied understanding of an interconnected, functioning worldwide human community? Are there systems of education that can cultivate such visions and vocabularies? Read more…
Westminster Bridge, London. Photo by Hugo Sousa on Unsplash Today, humans will extract almost 100 million barrels of oil from the Earth. The size of this continuous flow of black sludge is difficult to visualise but let’s try; combined with the extraction of coal and natural gas, the flow rate of fossil fuels Read more…