Christen Rayner, Year 12, St Anthony’s & St Aidan’s Sixth Form, Tyne and Wear Runner-up for the Schools Science Writing Competition, Trinity Term 2020 ‘Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.’ Katherine Dunn The discovery of penicillin was undoubtedly one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent…
Catrin Herrenden-Harker, Year 10, Kings Monkton, Wales Alzheimer and dementia are devastating diseases which affect 60 million people in the world, with the number set to grow, so is a major problem for healthcare systems and puts extreme pressure on old people’s homes. So, what are these diseases? Dementia is an overall term for diseases…
Cadence Webley, Year 11, St Georges College Weybridge, Surrey In 1825, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce looked at his silver chloride coated paper and realised he had just taken the first ever photograph. Louis Daguerre continued this process with a plate coated in silver iodide and developed the first ever portable camera which was made available to…
View our Hilary Term 2020 issue, Breakthrough, here. The Hilary 2020 issue of The Oxford Scientist is here! Packed full of articles looking at the past, present and future of groundbreaking scientific discovery.
Runner-up of the Hilary Term Schools’ Writing Competition 2020 Rosalie Ko, Year 11, Buckinghamshire “We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself.” – Greta Thunberg, Swedish climate activist and TIME Person of the…
Runner-up of the Hilary Term 2020 Schools’ Writing Competition Emily Allen, Year 12, Oxfordshire Something as tiny as 40μm surely doesn’t have the power to fix the planet? What if I told you it does. It’s hard to believe but cyanobacteria are mighty, despite being minute. They have photosynthetic abilities unlike other organisms. Residing freely…
Runner-up of the Hilary Term 2020 Schools’ Writing Competition Lucy Fan, Year 10, Surrey ‘Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.’ This is the most famous line uttered by Greta Thunberg- the 16 year old climate change activist who’s acted as the catalyst for so many school…
Runner-up of the Hilary Term 2020 Schools’ Writing Competition Elizabeth Dewes, Year 11, West Midlands Since the rise of Greta Thunberg, everyone has had at least some insight into the sinister threat of climate change. We are beginning to see the catastrophic effects of our average global temperature rising, with 10 million hectares of land…
Runner-up of the Hilary Term 2020 Schools’ Writing Competition Ayeza Akhtar, Year 12, Greater Manchester “Climate change will be irreversible by 2030” – UN. That gives us a mere 10 years to fix the mess we have been gradually creating over the 200,000 years us humans have been around. As bleak as that may sound,…
Runner-up of the Hilary Term 2020 Schools’ Writing Competition Rulan Zhang, Year 12, Berkshire Stephen Hawking, arguably the greatest physicist of our time once said: ‘I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet….
