There is a rich tradition of using wrist watches to mark special events, and I decided to revive this tradition for a PhD student who graduated from my lab. This posts details the process for anyone who is curious and/or would like to replicate it. Please do get in touch if you have any questions, including about procurement!
Sameer Alladin successfully defended his dissertation on Wednesday 30 September 2026! We’re delighted to see him finish his PhD after four very productive years in the lab, but also sad to see him go. This PhD was funded by an (extremely competitive!) International Scholarship funded by the University of Bristol,…
As anyone with a young child knows: they’re gross. They produce a tonne of bodily effluvia, and parents have to deal with all of it. It turns out this experience helps to inoculate parents not just against soiled nappies, but also non-child-related categories of yuck.
People generally avoid disgusting things, but what if you’re deciding whether to eat them? At an experimental buffet, people spent more time looking at edible insects and other unusual snacks. However, they only rated the insects as more disgusting. This suggests that novelty drives looking behaviour when we’re foraging, and can even overrule the tendency to look away from disgust elicitors.
Sameer won a prize for his talk at the University of Bristol Scholarship Celebration!
Evgeniya Anisimova gave a talk at the South-West Undergraduate Conference 2025. She spoke on how orthorexia impacts the stomach’s response to foods from different categories.
TL;DR A recent Editorial in the journal Brain has riled up academics. In the article, Prof Masud Husain argues against “bullshit jobs” in academia. Online, people seem to either recognise the content or to take offense to its tone and timing. Because the piece really resonated with me, I aim…
A computational model of avian navigation shows the minimal requirements for inter-generational cumulative improvements to spontaneously emerge.
Many people confuse the terms for sex (“male”, “female”, “intersex”, etc.) and the terms for gender (“man”, “woman”, “non-binary”, etc.), even though sex and gender are different constructs. This sounds like a pedantic point, but it leads to imprecise writing and theorising: Is the nature of your proposed mechanism biological, social, or both?
No.