Oxford's biggest student newspaper, produced by and for members of the University of Oxford, since 1991.
Image Description: Fireworks. The sparks from a sparkler are 1000-1600°C. Yet, they are still safe to use because there is a difference between temperature and energy. The thermal energy of the spark is related to its mass, as well as its temperature. As sparks have little mass, they do not have enough thermal energy to […]
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Image Description: Harbour Seal pup Seagulls are attracted to urban areas. This is because temperatures are generally 4-6°C warmer, meaning their breeding season can last for longer. There are also fewer predators in urban locations, and street-lighting allows them to forage in bins for food after dark, as well as stealing it straight out of […]
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Image description: hurricane. Researchers from Florida State University have discovered “stormquakes” – a new geophysical phenomenon formed when large storms interact with the ocean to cause a release of seismic waves that can travel for thousands of miles. These previously unknown seismic events can have the equivalent effect of earthquakes with magnitudes of over 3.5. […]
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Image Description: an optical circuit. As time goes on, our computer are becoming more and more powerful. This is primarily due to the ongoing development of the CPU (or GPU): the ‘brain’ of the computer. A pressing question facing the electronics industry is whether computers will one day become more powerful than a human beings. […]
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Image Description: YouTube In August 2019, the Indian rapper Badshah was widely accused of using a network of servers for the promotion of his latest music video ‘Paagal’. One day after release, this video had reached as many as 75 million views on YouTube, a record. The rapper maintains that he merely employed Google advertising […]
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Image Description: Prof. Sir John Gurdon. On Friday evening, Prof. Sir John Gurdon was invited to give a talk by the Oxford University Biological Society. His talk, titled ‘Over 60 years at the bench, and still there’ was a modest and candid account of his science career, from anecdotes about his school days, through to […]
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Image Description: roasted coffee beans. 600 billion cups of coffee are drunk globally each year. Coffee is one of your five-a-day, as it is a fruit. It’s also a seed, and not a bean. There are two types of coffee, Arabica and Robusta. Arabica coffee tends to be sweeter, but more acidic. Originally from the […]
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Image Description: a goat eating grass. Goats have rectangular pupils. This allows a wider range of vision of 340°, so pretty much everything, except what is directly behind them, which is essential for spotting predators and not getting eaten. However, with a rectangular pupil, goats cannot look up or down without moving their heads. […]
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Image Description: iPhone. On October 9, 2019, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino for “the development of lithium-ion batteries”. Look around and you will find lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries everywhere in your life – phones, computers and electrical vehicles. However, can you imagine that a […]
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Image Description: two people at the Biological Society stall at the Freshers’ Fair. All I remember of my Freshers’ Fair two years ago was how hot Exams Schools was, and how so many people kept trying to make small talk with me, neither of which agreed with (what is still) the worst hangover of […]
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Image Description: a bumblebee on an orange flower. 1. Bees have hairy tongues for drinking nectar. Bumblebees are able to drink both runny nectars and gloopy nectars. How they are able to do this has baffled scientists – until now. Bees have long, rod-like tongues covered in hair-like protrusions, best described as a tiny mop. This […]
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Professor Sir Peter J Ratcliffe, Director for the Target Discovery Institute within the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford University and Director of Clinical Research at Francis Crick Institute, London, has today been announced as a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Sir Ratcliffe was announced as a winner of the Prize […]
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Image Description: a tiger. Zoos are no modern issue. The origin of zoos can be traced to animals captured by the ancient Mesopotamian Sumerians, or perhaps the animals caged for entertaining guests of Roman senators. While zoos have changed drastically since then – more space, fewer bars – the harm done to animal welfare remains. […]
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Image description: Rembrandt van Rijn – Homer On 25 January this year, the journal Chemical Communications published a major breakthrough on a mystery that had hitherto perplexed the art world: why the Old Master Rembrandt van Rijn’s celebrated painting ‘Homer’ (1663) was coated in a thin white crust. The unknown composition and origin of the […]
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From enzymes to muscle tissue, the DNA held within the nucleus of cells contains instructions for the production of every protein in your body. Mutations in these genomic blueprints, whether inherited or induced by damaging environmental agents (e.g toxins, UV radiation), can result in proteins becoming malformed and dysfunctional and ultimately give rise to disease. […]
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The ‘science’ component of the social sciences is often the subject of jokes, with the idea that disciplines included in this label are not ‘real’ or ‘hard’ sciences. Their defenders are often quick to argue, however, that the quantitative tradition is a prevalent one among disciplines such as economics, demography, or political science. In my […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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