by Louis Claxton Over the past few years ocean plastic pollution has made its way into mainstream media and has even earnt the attention of politicians1. Thanks in part to Blue Planet II, the British public was made aware of just how large a problem plastic pollution is for the world’s aquatic life. Now,…
Using the power of choice and flexibility of neural connections to achieve well-being, lesson from Dr. Korb By Irene Trung The tuning of neural circuits depends on the genetics of the individual, childhood, and current experiences. Although we cannot select our genes and may have little control over our early experiences, we still have…
iGEM is an international competition where teams of university students compete in designing a genetically engineered product to tackle a world problem. Oxford’s iGEM team for 2018 is made up of 10 undergraduate students who study a range of subjects including biochemistry, biology, chemistry, engineering and medicine. After a long process of designing and planning…
Figuring out the composition of the bacteria in the gut, mouth, and on the skin is very fashionable at the moment, with papers regularly linking the microbiome to an unexpected disease. However, I can’t help but wonder if microbiotics isn’t the magic wand we were hoping for. Will it stand the test of time? Studying…
For most, March 2015 and September 2016 may have faded from memory. However as someone who studies the climate, these months stand out. March 2015 was the first month for at least 800,000 years that global average CO2 concentration remained above 400ppm. Moreover, in September 2016, the usual minimum for monthly CO2 levels, the concentration…
It’s Valentine’s day this week, and if you’ve had enough of flowers, cards and chocolates, you might want to take a peek into the romantic machinations of the animal kingdom – just to see how they’re getting on. We know that birds show a huge amount of sexual selection, with males producing some of the…
Mysteriously symmetric, beautifully complex, the how and why of snowflake formation. So, why do they form in the first place? Ice does not form out of nowhere, the water must condense around something. This is the case for most phase changes, and these “nucleation sites” could take the form of small particles, from dust and…
Artificial intelligence has pervaded human imagination since antiquity. The Greeks wrote about statues produced by men who “discovered the true nature of the gods” and mechanical men produced in ancient China that could “walk with rapid strides”. The Renaissance saw an unprecedented explosion of mathematical and scientific ideas fly across Europe in the so-called Age…
Quantum technologies to treat it; quantum physics to create it? An ambitious agreement: Tokyo, December 13th, 2016 The agreement is signed, five organisations join forces. Equipped with accelerating lasers and deflecting, superconducting magnets, they will develop a Quantum Scalpel. Their ambition is zero cancer deaths, says Toshio Hirano, chief of the National Institutes for Quantum…
A year ago, I found an advert sent out by the University’s volunteering hub to work on an innovative new app called “Self-Heal”. Having won funding from the Oxford IT innovation challenge, a group of students had recently developed the app, with input from clinicians, as a toolkit for students to manage self-injury. It covers…
