June Hyun, Year 10, Harrow School, Middlesex An estimated 25% of all marine life depends on coral reefs at some point in their lifecycle. Reefs support over 500 million peoples’ livelihoods, pump $3.4 Billion into the US economy and prevent $4.3 Billion in flood damage around the globe. They are also dying quicker than ever…
WINNER of the Michaelmas Term 2020 Schools Science Writing Competition Lucy Addis, Year 12, Royal School Armagh, Armagh Revolutionary. It’s a word that’s seldom used to describe cancer treatments, but that’s about to change. Immunotherapy is a “game-changing” new treatment that uses viruses to directly kill cancerous cells and make it much easier for the…
Click here to read our MT20 issue, Frontiers of Science. The Michaelmas 2020 issue of The Oxford Scientist is here! This magazine was put together in difficult circumstances. Especial thanks are therefore owed to our brilliant team, our writers, illustrators, and our readers, who have kept the spirit of science communication alive in spite of being…
The Radcliffe Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford is a large, multi-disciplinary department, which aims to tackle some of the world’s biggest health challenges by integrating innovative basic biology with cutting edge clinical research. The department has internationally renowned programmes in a broad spectrum of sciences related to medicine, including: Cancer Biology Cardiovascular Science Cellular and Clinical…
Talk Summary by Barbara Walkowiak Many of us are afraid of cardiovascular disease, and very much aware that if a blood clot forms in the vessels in our brain or heart, it can be life-threatening. What we do not usually think about is what happens when such a clot appears in the blood vessels supporting…
Talk Summary by Barbara Walkowiak The basics of photosynthesis, or why getting your own food is always challenging In times of climate change and rising global population, sustainable and efficient food production is of vital importance. The secret to improving crop yields may lie in the algal chloroplast, as powerfully described by Ella Catherall in…
Talk Summary by Jasmine Charles On the third day of the Varsity Sci Symposium, Gayatri Tadikamalia from the University of Oxford delivered a thought-provoking presentation on anorexia nervosa and the microbiome. Throughout this clear and well- constructed slideshow, Gayatri pointed out the links between gut composition and the psychiatric illness, and tried to establish whether…
Talk Summary by Leah Hurst For the second talk in the Translational Medicine series of the symposium we owe our thanks to Aaron Koh, an incoming Natural Sciences student at Cambridge. Following a research project during his holidays based at the Genome Institute of Singapore, Aaron not only shared with us his findings of a…
Talk Summary by Sam van Druten Viruses are a prevalent topic of discussion nowadays. I thought it would be interesting to watch the Varsity Sci talks on virology to help me understand the subject better, and to help distinguish between the fake news and real facts making their way through the media. I was grateful…
Oxbridge Varsity Sci Symposium. Talk Summary by Harry Crook. Recently the world reached the one-degree centigrade rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the first step in irreparable global warming; this has led to much research into CO2 emissions reduction. Initially this involved methods such as sequestration underground or simply planting trees,…
