Science Animated

The cornerstone of The African Development Bank’s “Feed Africa” campaign is the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT). TAAT is developing a database of agricultural technology and accompanying e-catalogs, showcasing technologies validated to ensure their scalability and benefits. The database and e-catalogs will connect potential agricultural technology adopters in the public and private sectors with the researchers and companies developing them and will provide guidance and advice to adopters.

With the help of schoolchildren and their teachers, scientists from the UK Health Security Agency (UK HSA) and the University of Birmingham published research which shows that children have stronger immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 than adults. This may explain why children tend to have milder COVID-19 symptoms. They also found that some children who had never had COVID-19 might already be protected from other related coronaviruses that usually cause the common cold.

Programming bacteria to synthesize and utilize non-standard chemistry enables novel application spaces. Here in the Kunjapur Lab, we have engineered bacteria to synthesize and program immunogenic residues into antigens for enhanced vaccination platforms.

TENTPEGS is a toolkit to guide healthcare professionals engaging with patients about making healthy lifestyle changes.

Based on existing scientific literature, the toolkit is comprised of seven key components and is patient-centred to show professionals how to help patients make lasting behavioural changes in a tailored and time-efficient way.

Presenting a new computational framework that can determine how effective nature-based solutions are at sequestering carbon and mitigating climate change. Multiple nature-based solutions can be compared to one another, so policymakers can make effective decisions to avoid warming and tackle climate change.

Audiences are diverse and have differing needs to be able to attend events. Taking this into consideration is key to providing equitable access and ensuring we reach all members of society with our public engagement activities.

Researchers at the University of Dundee School of Life Sciences are looking at how to provide accessible digital and physical resources to help reach wider audiences.

Doing inclusive engagement isn’t just a matter of what and how you say something – it’s also about who is doing the talking. It’s important to showcase the diversity of people involved in doing science so that audiences can see themselves represented. It’s also important to ensure that the work of planning and doing activities is equally distributed across everyone in a group.

Researchers at the University of Dundee School of Life Sciences are looking at how to ensure representation of all types of people in the planning and doing of public engagement activities. This will increase the likelihood that people will consider science as something they can participate in, either as engaged members of the public or as scientists themselves.

Meeting someone you don’t know and who is seen as an expert can be intimidating for many, so putting people at ease as soon as possible will help start an engagement right. But what is inclusive communication and why is word choice so important?

Researchers at the University of Dundee School of Life Sciences are looking at how to ensure inclusive communication by avoiding jargon and using accessible language. Taking steps such as these ensures inclusivity and helps everyone feel welcomed and valued.

Part of ensuring we work inclusively with communities is making sure that we are giving our audience what they need – not just what we think they should know. Consulting with your audience throughout the process is a key part of doing good public engagement.

Researchers at the University of Dundee School of Life Sciences are looking at how we can take people’s backgrounds and beliefs into consideration to ensure they feel involved with the process of science.

The inability for scientists to reproduce each other’s work has significant effects on preclinical studies in both delays and expenditure. SciScore is a methods review tool designed to improve reporting standards, to minimize unnecessary delays due to incompleteness and maximise robustness, so that experiments can be reproduced optimally.