Taking paracetamol in pregnancy doesn’t increase your baby’s risk of autism or ADHD – new review

Paracetamol can safely treat fever and pain at any stage of pregnancy. And it’s important, as leaving fever untreated can be dangerous for the mother and baby.

A History of Illustrating Science - YouTube Traditionally, the aims of art and science viewed as being very different. But throughout history, illustration has played a key role in communicating scient...

#Art🎨 and #Science🔬 traditionally have different aims, but art has been crucial in conveying scientific knowledge. So for a #SciComm project, I created a series of short vids with 5 key historical examples of illustration at the fore of sharing science.
Check them out!👇

youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Home Bringing scientists to your local pub to present their latest discoveries & make you fall in love with science

Melbourne and Bendigo - the Pint of Science Australia festival #Pint25 is coming to your pubs next week! I’ll be there (20th May in Melbourne, 21st in Bendigo) talking about the brains
🧠 & senses👁️ of wasps🐝 that hunt down big hairy spiders🕷️. Tickets are $10 and on sale now!🎟️👇
pintofscience.com.au

‘Curiosity-driven research’ led to a recent major medical breakthrough. But it’s under threat

Curiosity-driven research is exactly what it sounds like: research driven by the goal of understanding nature without regard for application.

Cancer Research Giving Day 2025 Join us on Tuesday 4 February, where for one day your donation will be doubled!

Today on #WorldCancerDay donations to Cancer Council Victoria are being matched by generous supporters up to $500K, so please donate if you can - any amount makes a difference:
fundraising.cancervic.org.au/event/cancer...

Lymphoma turned my life upside down in 2022.
Over 2yrs on from undergoing 6mo of gruelling chemotherapy, I remain in full remission. Not all are so lucky.
1 in 2 Aussies will have been diagnosed with #cancer by age 80, and research to improve treatments and survival rates is desperately needed

Acquiring “the Knowledge” of London's Layout Drives Structural Brain Changes The last decade has seen a burgeoning of reports associating brain structure with specific skills and traits (e.g., [1–8]). Although these cross-sectional studies are informative, cause and effect are impossible to establish without longitudinal investigation of the same individuals before and after an intervention. Several longitudinal studies have been conducted (e.g., [9–18]); some involved children or young adults, potentially conflating brain development with learning, most were restricted to the motor domain, and all concerned relatively short timescales (weeks or months).

Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire passed away this week. If her name is unfamiliar, her work likely isn’t: it was she who discovered the hippocampus in the brain of qualified London taxi drivers grew larger after learning the complex layout of London’s ~25000 streets! 🚕🧠
www.cell.com/current-biol...?

Like you Kylie I need to do better at it but this helped in 2024:
•out of office auto-reply on non work days
•communicate work pattern to committee organisers/stakeholders so they know when I’m available
•say no to things that aren’t essential or don’t add value
•not opening emails on non work days

A katydid camouflaged perfectly with beard lichen

A lichen mimic katydid at Wildsumaco in Ecuador. These absolutely disappear into this beard lichen. Finding one was mostly a happy accident.

Its neat to think about the selective pressure that lead to them looking just like this lichen, that they both live around and eat as their main diet.

I raced past you on the way to a friend’s talk and thought “oh it’s Ness!” but couldn’t stop and didn’t spot you again 🥺

You’ve joined the mass migration Ness! (I did during ESA)

A big week at #ESAus2024 the biggest ever @ecolsocaus.bsky.social
conference! One of the 1300 attendees was my friend & fellow Future Science Talks Comedy Program alumnus @drobledoruiz.bsky.social
Mixing your #science with #comedy is a great way to keep the audience engaged (I hope we were funny🫣)

Couldn’t get to this session unfortunately but this image does absolutely nothing to reduce my skepticism about AI!

Proud to share that my colleagues Allison van de Meene, Anders Barlow & I received the 2024 University of Melbourne #ResearchInfrastructure Excellence Award for Research Development & Training Initiatives “for outstanding contributions to advancing innovative training and capacity-building programs”