if you've been wondering where I've been seeing as I said that I'd make a whole
series about fly videos I have been stuck in this fly lab for about the last
three or four weeks non-stop which alongside moving house has been very
stressful but building a website with Squarespace need not be stressful
I love these tenuous links that's right Squarespace is sponsoring this video
Thank You Squarespace for giving me money for promoting your wonderful
service which is a beautiful website designer simple to use doesn't require
coding you can buy domains on there it has shop functionality and it does
mobile stuff really well it's pretty it's simple and if you want to try it
out for free you can go to squarespace.com/sallylepage for a free trial and
10% off your first purchase so thanks Squarespace use that link to
thank Squarespace for paying me so that it gives me some motivation to upload
videos because my god I have just been sciencing so much recently that yeah
you'll see very very soon like now actually
science is boring I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell it to you but that's
just the way it is when science communicators start calling themselves
science cheerleaders when science presenters are referred to as rock stars
when geek is the new cool is said frequently enough to become a slogan on
a t-shirt you may easily become fooled into thinking that science is
groundbreaking and exciting sure scientific findings can be thrilling
finding out that the bacteria in your gut not only vastly outnumber the cells
in your body but also control your brain okay
that's interesting or finding out that Mars the red planet is only
superficially red and is actually gray just under the surface and we know
because we were able to catapult a one ton robot 560 million kilometres and
land still within three kilometers of the target yeah that's impressive or
even finding out that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster somehow knows
who its relatives are and can change its mating behavior accordingly yes these
are all cool findings but the act of doing science the process by which we
discover these findings is very often boring and that's not accidental by
testing our predictions over and over again to improve reliability by
randomizing and blinding our experimental design to reduce bias by
meticulously taking records so we can further examine a blip in the data that
might turn out to be important this all creates repetitive boring tedious
science the sort of science where you spend five minutes just writing the
numbers one to 120 on the back of petri dishes yes it's only two and a half
seconds per number but when you're labeling and literally thousands of
dishes vials and tubes you end up spending hours of your
life just writing one number after the next or the science where you're counted
don't get me started on the counting I have spent months with a tally counter
in one hand a box of dead flies in the other just counting months then there's
the science that requires slightly more brain engagement that is no less soul
sucking like painstakingly picking up a particular fly egg with a needle and
putting it in a particular vial and then repeating that 5000 times because that's
what science is science is people doing precise mundane tasks over and over and
over again until they have enough data to find out something new about the
world and the allure of discovery yes it's seductive and exhilarating but
don't be fooled science is boring