Question: What are the negatives in your scientific area of work?

Freya Addison answered on 18 Nov 2019:

Similar to Joanna, when things don’t work. Programming is a core element to my work and its frustrating when you have written a 500lines of code and then it doesn’t run because you put in a semi-colon where there ought to be a colon on line 343. Or the file you are working on doesn’t have any metadata – essentially the column names for all the numbers in the dataset. Or when you have accidentally set an infinite loop, so your code runs forever!
Bits of equipment break all the time, sometimes it’s an easy fix, sometimes it can be months of work, to diagnose which bit is broken, why to order a new part and fix it all whilst you can’t collect data.
Another problem is “fake news”. A colleague recently published a paper and a news outlet picked up and created this sensationalist headline which took their work completely out of context. Scientists can be stereotyped as poor communicators but that is actually a major part of our job to distil what we learnt in different ways to share with people. We are always looking at ways we can improve on this but it can be difficult to be taken seriously when things are taken out of context or in the wrong way.