The science event to go to: Cereals in Practice

As part of my current job at the lovely James Hutton Institute, a first class research centre where science involves tackling some of the world’s most challenging problems including the impact of climate change and threats to food and water security, I helped out at the Cereals in Practice event yesterday. It was held on a farm somewhere halfway between Dundee and Perth.

A lonely James Hutton flag - the visitors have yet to come

May I present: Two triops

Now that I've been looking after my triops for more than a week, here comes an update. There are two of them, Bertie and Jocelyn (I am told that there are always more female than male triops, but Bertie looks and behaves very male to me). Bertie is almost a centimetre long now, while Jocelyn is about seven millimetres. She's at least two days younger, although it's hard to tell, because she hid in the 'teabag' that was maintaining the water quality and I only found her yesterday.

Bertie.

Bertie, swimming on his back.

It's surprisingly exiting to watch them swim around. Bertie races through the market place, always swimming as fast as possible. Jocelyn stays closer to the ground, nibbling on algae that grow on the stones. I've noticed that when the light doesn't come directly from above, the two little swimmers don't seem to know where is up and where is down. If the light is coming from below, they start swimming on their backs - very cute :)

Jocelyn, hiding in a corner.

Today, I made 'triops city' a little more homely. I added stones and sand to the different 'rooms'. For now, the two triops are staying in the central market place area, but they seem to explore their changed home step by step.

The triops' new home.

I'm quite happy that they haven't eaten each other yet :)

Once they're a little bigger, I will add some protein-rich food to the special triops food, this is supposed to help against cannibalism in the aquarium.

Update 13th May: Poor Jocelyn died a few days ago. Bertie is growing rapidly, he's more than two centimetres tall by now. He's shedding his skin almost every day, which is the only way they can grow (and it's quite a good way of measuring his growth). I hope he's actually female, so that I get some triops eggs after all :)

Ancient pets

As I am currently cat-less (rather woeful domestic circumstances) and spending the summer living with people suffering from a range of allergies, I had to take desperate measures and buy myself a little treat: Triops City.

For those of you who have never come across triops (also known as 'sea monkeys', 'little turtles' in Spanish or 'floßfüßige Seewürmer mit dem Schild' in German in 1732): They are living fossils, with a fossil record reaching back 300 million years ago. These relatives of prawns and lobsters are little crustaceans that can grow a few centimetres long. I used to have them in the past, never very successfully, so this time I'm following the instructions carefully and step by step.

The city that will hopefully soon house my little pets is made of cheap plastic, and consists of five chambers separated by little locks (to prevent older triops from eating their young siblings): there's a market place in the middle, surrounded by a baby station, a beach, a disco and a playground (somehow I'm missing the office). Before I can place the eggs into the city, I first have to fill it with destilled water and add something resembling a tea bag, which is to ensure the right water quality for the triops. Tomorrow evening, I will be able to add the eggs, and then it shouldn't take long for the first larvae to hatch.

Update 25.4.2013: I've added the eggs 24 hours ago, and am now waiting for the triops to hatch.

Update 26.4.2013, 11am: The first triops has hatched! He's tiny, maybe 1/3 mm in length. Now I'm waiting for his siblings to hatch before he starts eating them :)

Update 28.4.2013, 12.30am: It's feeding time! My two little darlings are growing really fast, and they're quite active, swimming around the Baby Station and the Marketplace. The last two days they had to live on the nutrients the 'tea bag' provided (first it optimised the water quality, then it serves as a food source), but now I gave them a tiny grain of their food.
I haven't given up hope yet, the other triops might hatch at some time. If not, at least the fight for food will be quite a bit less...

All about sex

[Another article written for university.]

Her life is all about sex. She reads, writes, and talks about it. Thinks about it - a lot. And on her office window high up above the city, there is a three-letter sign: SEX. Some people might say she is obsessed with it, but for Jocelyn Wentland sex is her job. She is a sex researcher at Ottawa University, and has been studying relationships, both sexual and otherwise, ever since she took a sexuality class as an undergraduate. Wentland is very outspoken person who feels comfortable with using straightforward street-level sexual words, which don’t always sound exactly scientific or academic.

"Stefan Franke" / www.jugendfotos.de

For her honours thesis at the University of British Columbia, she looked at why women have casual sex. Wentland says, "We found that women engage in casual sex for the same reasons men do: They are drunk, they are horny, they want to do it, the guy is hot and they want to take him home from the bar."

Since then she has moved on to focus on how both gender's definition of relationships have changed, on which she focuses for her PhD thesis. "Classically, you hear ‘relationship’ and think of committed, long-term, monogamous situations, ending in marriage, kids and a house in the suburbs. But for many people, especially young adults, the notion of what qualifies as a relationship is very different."

Many might only think of strangers and the classic one-night stand when hearing 'casual sex', but Wentland sees a more nuanced definition in her research. There are three other types of relationships she looks at: the 'Booty Call', 'Fuck-Buddies' and 'Friends With Benefits'. "They are casual sex relationships, but they are ongoing, and there is an element of knowing the person, which is definitely not there with the one-night stand," she explains.

But with all these nuances, there's also the problem of defining casual sex. "Are we talking about intercourse, any kind of sexual activity, oral sex and do both people get oral sex? That is a big problem with the literature, that researchers don't define casual sex." Her very own definition for casual sex is the “sexual activity that happens outside the context of a committed relationship”.

While friends and family know what she does for a living, Wentland is a little careful in telling other people. She has two ways in which she answers what her job is. If it is a friend, or someone who she thinks can handle the truth, she says sex researcher. Other people get the more diplomatic answer, a psychologist or a relationship researcher. But the reactions can still be quite interesting. "I've heard everything from 'I can't believe you're getting a PhD in that' to: ‘You must be some sex-crazy nymphomaniac' and everything in between", says Wentland. That might be why many of her fellow researchers identify themselves as relationship researchers. "That's safer, essentially. Maybe I'm just pushing the envelope, but I'm happy to do sex research."

And for all the time she spends researching relationships and sex, she cannot define her own sexuality. "I will have to think about that", she says with a shrug. "Yes, I do sex research, but my personal life is pretty private to me." She continously tries to separate the research from her personal life: "My career is very different from my sex life."

She pauses a moment to think, then says, "I notice that I am immersed in this pretty much full-time: Reading about sex, writing about it, researching it, analysing sex results and findings from my study. I am always in it, and I am able to talk about really intimate and personal things, but they are not that intimate or personal to me, because I have that researcher's hat on. For me, sex is not something that only happens behind closed doors." She has had dating partners in the past who had problems with her being a sex researcher. "They would ask me whether this was Jocelyn, the sex researcher or Jocelyn, the girlfriend," she says. "It's a balance. Sometimes I have to remind myself that not everyone lives the life of a sex researcher."