Author: David Kell

In thousands of years’ time, a small green creature on the planet Gliese 667 Cc, 22 light years away, will be analysing astronomical data. They will notice an anomaly. They will discover that passing through their system is a tiny, metal craft. They will alert the community, and much effort will be made to retrieve […]

Emerging from the cinemas, bleary eyed and squinting, transported from 161 minutes in the land of Pandora many fell into a ‘post- avatar depression’, lamenting in the emptiness of a life without blue skin and a tail.  A human consciousness implanted into a manmade carrier may seem like a concept more suited to the realms […]

I am guilty of trying to force my music taste onto other people. You see, I’m quite sure that if everyone would just listen hard enough to the dulcet tones of synthesised prog rock or whatever musical phase I’m going through that week, they would experience the same intense musical trip that I do. And […]

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.  A beautiful poem and song, but the fact that stars twinkle is terribly frustrating to astronomers. It is impossible to study an astronomical object in detail if its image is constantly twinkling, moving and changing. The atmosphere is constantly changing due to wind and temperature, […]

Picture the JCR on a Friday night. In the corner next to the dart board and pool tables a large of circle of guys are stood up, drinking, sharing banter and flirting with the females closeby – why? According to social scientists, part of the reason lies with the need for males to continuously reassert […]

Social media has become somewhat of a necessity in our day to day lives – the frame-by-frame status updates on just how many shots so and so has taken, the odd picture of the funniest person asleep in that lecture and the inevitable rehashing of the horrors of last night’s tomfoolery in a state of […]

Twenty years on, and the Hubble Space Telescope is still pushing the boundaries of astronomy. Ever since its faulty primary mirror was corrected, it has produced some of the most beautiful and iconic images in astronomy. And even though there are telescopes on the ground with better light-gathering power and resolution than Hubble, Hubble can […]

The ‘average’ Oxford student is a very busy entity. In keeping up with reading, events, assignments, essays and actually having fun, there is very little time and mental stamina left to really get involved with non-field related news. So even if the Geographer is rabidly interested in Physics, it could be rather difficult to find […]

Economic well-being comes with environmental inequalities. Maintaining the modern lifestyle has significant impacts on the environment, where the minority live in impoverished and environmentally poor locations. The environmental justice movement can be considered as an active interaction between the environment, health and action. Here, action can be considered political or activist action at local and […]

By way of introduction, could you give us a brief introduction into your research interests and role at The Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics In brief I am interested in using and developing new mathematical tools to analyse data. The data may be in the form of signals collected over some period of […]

As a growing proportion of the population reach old age, nature’s arsenal is being tested. Where as once, one might have expected to perish at the hands of famine, plague, or what these days may be considered an innocuous infection, it is now the protracted suffering of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and cancer that […]

If you take a stroll through the University Parks at any given time of day, it’s not uncommon, to say the least, to find you encounter someone enthusiastically jogging around the gravel paths. Running is a good way for all of us to de-stress from studying, take a break, and do something healthy to keep […]

Maths is often about trying to show that a statement is definitely and irrefutably true for all cases. The area of the square of the hypotenuse is always equal to the areas of the squares on the other two sides, and the square of an odd number is always odd. These are the certainties which […]

You may not have thought about Christmas yet – but advertisers certainly have. Over the next few weeks you will be bombarded with adverts claiming that products are cheaper, better, prettier and faster. But can you trust these claims? Part of the answer to this question relies on whether you can trust your brain to […]

We’re all grossed out by things like eating a biscuit with a worm in it, or putting someone else’s used pants in the washing basket, but a study at the University of Groningen has found that women are less likely to be repulsed by disgusting things, if they are sexually aroused. This research builds on […]

At the heart of technological innovation is the transformation of scientific or engineering research into novel commercial products. Innovative technologies can solve problems, generate improvements, and drive change in the way we do almost everything. Creating and exploiting such technologies has great potential for economic gain, for both the innovator and wider society. Big business […]

This September, Gary Smith was charged with involuntary manslaughter of fellow Army Ranger and roommate Michael McQueen in 2006. According to the jury, he was guilty; according to the latest brain scanning technology, he was innocent. Which do you trust more? The technology under question is fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which is capable of […]