Oxford's biggest student newspaper, produced by and for members of the University of Oxford, since 1991.
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 […]
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Image Credit: Erica Yokoyama “In the current climate, where populism is attacking not only the political elite, anybody with an education is now being classified as an elite and it is particularly having impacts on things like art, theatre, and the sciences.” Last Friday, November 17th, these powerful introductory remarks struck those attending the lecture […]
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Image Credit: Kimberly Glassman On Wednesday 25 October 2018, Dr. Bert Hansen, author of Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America (2009) came to Green Templeton College as this year’s McGovern Lecturer on the history of medicine (endowed by the late Dr John McGovern […]
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Image Credit: Wikipedia I had come across The Science Gallery’s motto, “Where art and science collide,” months before I officially made the move to England. As an art historian and curator, this short statement had me wondering what kind of experiences one could expect to have in an exhibition space that brings art and science into […]
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Image Credit: Oxford University Using the UK’s Biobank data, which includes genetic information and detailed brain images, scientists at the University of Oxford have reported finding new insights into the structure and functioning of the brain. The UK Biobank resource contains some 10,000 magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of brains scans from patients in the UK […]
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Image Credit: Magnus D (CC BY 2.0) After a long day of lectures, labs and tutes it can be hard to be enthusiastic about even more science that is probably way over our heads. However, the combination of a huge faculty filled with brilliant minds eager to share their expertise and a university keen to […]
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Image Credit: Duncan Hull (CC BY 2.0) A group of eleven European funding organisations which contribute annually around £5.9 billion in grants for scientists, have agreed to ensure that scientific papers written by their grantees shall be open access from the point of publication. This will be accomplished by banning their grantees from publishing in […]
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More than a decade in the making, a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Erlangen in Germany and the Cleveland Clinic in the USA has published a breakthrough study in The Lancet journal this week. The team at the University of Oxford has developed a way of measuring coronary inflammation, allowing doctors to better detect the […]
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In 1865, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson made history as the first women to qualify as a physician and surgeon. Since then, considerable gender equality advancements have been made for workers of the NHS. In 1874, the first medical school in Britain to train women as doctors was founded. Just two years later, a law was passed […]
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Ever since Dustin Hoffman won the Oscar for Best Actor playing Rain Man, half of Best Actor Oscars have been won by men playing characters with significant disability. The 2018 Academy Awards have recently graced our screens; including Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar-winning performance last year in The Theory of Everything as motor neurone disease (MND) sufferer […]
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Bahá’í is what we might consider to be a ‘new religious movement’, because it has only come about within the last 150 years. It considers its recent emergence to be one more step on humanity’s advancement towards maturity, as the Bahá’ís believe that all religions brought about great leaps in human progress and understanding. Bahá’í […]
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Launched as a collaborative effort between Hertford, Pembroke, and Wolfson in 2015, Tri-Innovate is an initiative which aims to encourage graduate and undergraduate students to try their hand an entrepreneurship. Teams must develop an innovative commercial or social enterprise and pitch their idea to a panel of judges with £8,000 on offer for the winners. […]
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The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical diagnosis and treatment is a swiftly burgeoning area of technology. Brainomix, a medical imaging company, is at the forefront of this. Specifically, they use AI for rapid diagnosis and treatment for victims of strokes. Brainomix was launched in 2010 as a spin-out of Oxford University, with the […]
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The line between love and hate is often described as painfully thin. This is a peculiar concept given the two polar opposite definitions of the words one can find in any dictionary. It seems logical to me that the similarity may arise from the fact that love and hate are so often felt for the […]
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Using the European Space Organisation (ESO)’s Very Large Telescope (Cerro Paranal, Chile), astronomers have discovered a star in a massive globular cluster, which appears to orbit an invisible black hole that is four times the size of our Sun. This stellar mass is ‘the first black hole found in a globular cluster and the first […]
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A career in science is not for the faint-hearted. It involves years of training, achieving a PhD and multiple post-doctoral positions, before the ultimate goal of having your own lab or even a prestigious professorship is achieved. A recent survey in the journal Nature has suggested this already difficult path is harder than we all […]
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Googling ‘mysteries that science can’t explain’ returns a pile of results all pedalling the same narrative; that “scientists think they have all the answers but they don’t really know any better than you do”. For example, the Daily Forest article ‘Amazing Mysteries That Science Just Can’t Explain’ brags all manner of ‘conundrums’ from magnetism even to the act of […]
Continue Reading“Psychedelics! LSD! Psilocybin!” is not something that you expect to hear at the OUSU Fresher’s Fair. Yet, if you walked through the “Miscellaneous” section of the Fresher’s Fair this year, you might have heard this pitch. Alternatively, you could have witnessed what looked like the oddest drug deal in history: free blotter tabs, typically associated […]
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Bonnie Tyler didn’t realise how aptly her song ‘Holding out for a Hero’ described the lives of the Bdelloid Rotifers – in all three hundred years that we have been searching, we’ve never found a male, just millions and millions of females. Well, there was one single report, about 100 years ago, scantily documented, that […]
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