One seed in the ocean: how and why it started.

Hello everybody and welcome!

This is my first blog, so I hope you will forgive these hesitant first steps. The idea of opening a blog has grown slowly but steadily during the first months of my PhD journey as a mixture of feelings, ranging from a deep pleasure in writing (that's always been there, ever since I can remember!), to the need of reaching out to all the people out there (not only fellow researchers) that are interested in the discipline, who wish to know more and genuinely love to just have a chat about it.

Amongst the many challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought on us, unfortunately, it also has shown to us just how strong the distrust in the sciences is. We had a first hand experience of how quickly misinformation spread through social media, feeding on ignorance and our worst fears. During those first months, I could see the effort of the scientific community trying to explain and make itself understood by the public, like sparse flares in that incredibly loud nonsense chattering, without much success. I wondered how come no one was listening, how come it seemed like those words couldn't reach the majority? I personally think that, as a whole, the scientific community is still perceived (and sometimes still behaves) as a fortress, far and inaccessible to the public it works for. It was then that I thought why don't we ("we" as in the people actually studying and working in science) talk more to the public and in an easier way?

And that's how the idea of this blog was seeded in my head.

The hope is that taking you with me on my PhD journey you will be able to see through my eyes how far we ("we" as in humanity, this time!) have gone in our understanding of the world, what we are actually capable of and also how difficult that journey sometimes is, with its ups and downs, mistake by mistake, until finally a victory or a new discovery is reached.

"My sciences" are mostly forensic, therefore my topics might be biased towards that direction! However, most of the time, the forensic sciences have their roots in other disciplines and often raise different kinds of questions that are strictly related to our cultural relationship to the treatment of the dead, how far is "too far" when investigating humans, what is the balance between progress and respect.

Get comfy then, and let's start this new experiment together!