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This is a very belated follow-up to “Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on”, and it’s about how to turn Step 2, “Learn lots of stuff”, into concrete progress. I’m putting it here, now, because I frequently get asked by students about how to get started in research, and I’ve been sending them the same advice for a while.

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As has been discussed here before, the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) does not only innervate the larynx, but also parts of the esophagus and trachea (see this post, and in particular this comment). You can see that in this cadaver photo, in which the RLN is sending nice big visible branches into both the esophagus […]

For reasons that I will explain in a later post, I am parting with one of my most treasured possessions: the badger skull that I extracted from my roadkill specimen four years ago.

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Otters are a “near-threatened” species in the UK, so it’s a tragedy when one is killed by a car. That said, when a roadkill otter is spotted by a friend and delivered to me five days after Christmas, that goes some way to redeeming the tragedy. So far as I can determine, while otters are protected by law in the UK, there’s nothing saying that a roadkill otter can’t be kept for scientific purposes.

In lieu of any new science today, have some memes, and a wonderful day!

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