Oxford's biggest student newspaper, produced by and for members of the University of Oxford, since 1991.
A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has made it very clear that drastic, immediate cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are needed to limit global warming to 1.5° C. With the absence of a technological silver bullet, this requires rapid changes at unprecedented scale across all sectors of the global economy. Just as […]
Continue Reading
“I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.” – Dmitri Mendeleev On 6th March 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev stood before the Russian Chemical Society and presented ‘The Dependence […]
Continue Reading
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) affects around half a million people in the UK, though its impacts spread much wider, devastating the lives of families and friends of sufferers. It is a type of dementia, a group of diseases associated with memory loss, confusion, mood variations and difficulties in communicating. Knowledge about the causes of AD remains […]
Continue Reading
Sir Michael Atiyah OM FRS FRSE FMedSci FAA FREng died on 11th January, aged 89. The British-Lebanese mathematician was born on 22nd April 1929 to a Scottish mother and Lebanese father and, after spending both his undergraduate and postgraduate time at Trinity College, Cambridge, went on to win many awards including the Fields medal (arguably […]
Continue Reading
For such tiny insects, mosquitoes pack a large punch. Responsible for over 800,000 deaths per year worldwide, they are the hitmen of some of the deadliest diseases, including Zika virus, Yellow fever, Dengue fever, and Malaria. The females use the protein in human blood to produce eggs, and although biting causes little direct harm, the […]
Continue Reading
Whales. Maybe they’re just a group of animals you remember from a nature documentary. Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to see them in person. Or maybe, if you want to be technical, you’ll know them as a paraphyletic group of organisms within the Cetaceans, excluding the Dolphins. As someone who loves whales, and satisfies the […]
Continue Reading
The origin of life remains one of the greatest and most contentious problems of science and society as a whole. Religions and scientists can’t agree with themselves, let alone each other. For some, life was created with the will of an omnipotent being. For others, life was brought from another planet, perhaps on a meteorite, […]
Continue Reading
Running from 8th to 11th January, CES 2019 played host to almost 200,000 attendants, all browsing the latest tech produced by the world’s leading companies. Billed as the ‘global stage for innovation’, this year exhibitors presented new products and technologies across the entire consumer electronics industry, from immersive entertainment to smart devices. Evolutions in television […]
Continue Reading
Globally we kill 74 billion animals a year. 80% of farmland on Earth is used for livestock, where the process efficiency of fodder crop nutrients ending up in the meat we eat is horrifically low. The production of one kilogram of steak requires 15,000 litres of water and 15% of all our greenhouse gas emissions […]
Continue Reading
To say Trump’s wall is controversial is like saying leaving the EU has been a minor nuisance. The associated government shutdown has been wreaking havoc across America, including the science sector, where data has been lost, researchers are struggling without pay, and science as a whole is losing out. However, conservationists and environmentalists are worried […]
Continue Reading
Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionise our computing capabilities, and IBM’s recent announcement of their Q System One suggests that huge strides are being made towards utilising them for practical purposes in business environments. The Q System One is “the world’s first fully integrated universal quantum computing system designed for scientific and commercial use” […]
Continue Reading
It came as a shock to the scientific community when in late November, He Jiankui, a Chinese biophysicist, claimed that he had created the first genetically edited babies using CRISPR, a new gene editing technique developed in 2012. Not only would this mark the first use of CRISPR in humans, rather than in cell cultures, […]
Continue Reading
Oceans make up nearly three quarters of our planet’s surface and are home to over 300,000 currently described species, with an estimated 95% of the total number yet to be discovered. But just how important are these species and why should we care to protect them? Life underwater is so fundamentally important to our existence […]
Continue Reading
A placebo is an inert medical treatment, often a sugar pill, that is administered during a clinical trial to differentiate between a response to active medication and a response with no treatment. They have no therapeutic value but can alter the patient’s perception of their symptoms. A new review of 1271 randomised trials and 250,726 […]
Continue Reading
Image credit: Reversing Your Diabetes Today (CC0 1.0) Millions of people in the UK are living with Type 2 diabetes, resulting from the body’s inability to properly produce or respond to the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels, insulin. While Type 1 usually arises in childhood, Type 2 is associated with adults, especially those that […]
Continue Reading
Image Credit: Verisimilus (CC BY 2.5) For nearly 70 years, a fierce debate has been raging in the paleontological community: what is this fossil? The creature in question, a 558 million year old organism, was first discovered in 1947 and has been referred to as Dickinsonia. Its flat, oval shaped, ribbed body resembles that of […]
Continue Reading
Image Credit:Jami Dwyer Tropical forest constitutes the most diverse and complex biomes on Earth. Since Humboldt to the present day, the ecology of these biomes has been captivating and challenging scientists. The speciality of the ecology of these biomes reaches further than pure natural history; they are of key importance to the world: from timber, […]
Continue Reading