Finding that needle: searching tips
I’ve spent the last few months constructing ready made searches for Nutrition and Food Sciences on CAB Direct. Here are some general handy tips for choosing the words for searches that I have gathered on the way. This isn’t the CAB Direct helpfile, you’ll find that on CAB Direct.
The Blandford Fly is not confined to Blandford (and other interesting facts about blackflies)
Although the weather has become quite autumnal in the last week or so, the mosquitoes which have been flying around my house in the evenings in unusually high numbers in recent weeks (fortunately without biting me much) have not yet disappeared, and have reminded me of an interesting article1 that I came across earlier in…
From NASA to the takeaway – does HACCP overburden small businesses?
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the Sixth National HACCP Conference – The New HACCP Regulation on Catering and Retail: One Year On, in London in June this year. This was a great insight into the people and science involved in caring for my well being when eating out or taking away…
Vote for the winner of the “Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting” icon contest
As mentioned in a previous article, there is growing debate in the blog sphere over the need for a means to identify the sources of science being reviewed or used as evidence by bloggers. Well, the authors of “Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting” or BP3 for short, devised an icon design competition for which CABI,…
Food colourings studies – Handle with care!
So, food colourants cause hyperactivity in children. Or do they? Today’s news about the food colourants study undertaken at the University of Southampton in the UK highlights just how carefully studies need to be designed and how even more care needs to be taken in interpreting the results.
Pass the chocolate?
The report (1) that a maternal junk food diet in pregnancy may lead to a taste for junk food in the offspring (albeit rats) has attracted my attention today. Is this something else I should be worrying about this pregnancy? In the study conducted at the Royal Veterinary College, rats were fed either rodent chow…
Isobel Hoskins
Dr Isobel Hoskins Content Editor, Human Sciences After taking a degree in biochemistry at Sheffield University. I worked for 18 months as a research technician on the molecular genetics of capsule formation in Haemophilus influenzae in Professor Moxon’s Lab at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. This encouraged me to take a PhD so I…
The joys of biological containment
The foot and mouth disease outbreak near Pirbright in the UK and the associated issues of biological containment have brought back for me the time I spent working in a (different) biological containment lab >10 years ago. What did we do to contain the organism?
Highlighting the use of evidence
I spotted this blog article on Friday morning and sent it on to one of my colleagues, and soon it was sent around all the blog team here at CABI. This whole topic of the use of an icon/logo to highlight the use of peer-reviewed evidence has caused a great deal of discussion and a…
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells: TB complacency is not acceptable
This is about TB or more precisely Extremely Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (XDR-TB). It’s the kind of “reaction rant” you can find in the columns of the UK’s newspaper The Times (hence the title) but with a difference: I have CABI’s Global Health database to back me up. The contextTB first became multidrug resistant (MDR-TB) in…