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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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Biotechnology is at the forefront of the twenty-first century’s biological revolution, developing novel therapies grounded in the mechanisms already exploited by biology. Biotech companies themselves are the minnows of the pharmaceutical world, streamlined for the sole purpose of developing these treatments—no marketing costs, just pure research and development —and aiming for the ultimate prize of […]
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Biotechnology is at the forefront of the twenty-first century’s biological revolution, developing novel therapies grounded in the mechanisms already exploited by biology. Biotech companies themselves are the minnows of the pharmaceutical world, streamlined for the sole purpose of developing these treatments—no marketing costs, just pure research and development —and aiming for the ultimate prize of […]
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Once again, Jack Bradfield and Poltergeist Theatre prove that they’re cleverer than us. In the nicest possible way. Garden, Bradfield’s latest piece of new writing, takes everything that last summer’s xx had, and pushes it further: succinct wit, a diverse range of characters, engaging physicality and staging, and a plot hinging on a scientific/philosophical concept […]
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When I arrived to watch a rehearsal of Garden, most of the cast were wearing plant pots on their heads. This, it turned out, was not a daring fashion statement, but an image which captured the essence of Jack Bradfield’s witty, heartfelt new comedy. Garden follows Elizabeth, a phytologist (plant scientist), and a group of […]
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President Donald Trump is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a little fuzzy on the specifics of the Mars mission. Two weeks ago, he instructed NASA to get astronauts to Mars within his first term, approximately before 2021. In a recent livestream with astronaut Peggy Wilson, Trump rallied: “We want to do it during my first term and at […]
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In his famous allegory of the cave Plato suggests that there are a group of people, prisoners, facing a wall, unable to direct their vision at anything else. Behind them lies reality, which has its true form projected onto the wall the prisoners are doomed to watch indefinitely. The prisoners only see the shadows and […]
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