Features
The Science of Snowflakes
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…
Mimicking the Mind
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…
The Quantum in Cancer
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…
Bringing Mental Health Support into the 21st Century
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…
Burgers, Bacon… and Antibiotics?
I love bacon so much. And burgers, and chicken nuggets. So as you can imagine, becoming a vegetarian wasn’t something that I’d previously considered. But I’ve now been veggie for 3 weeks and counting, because it felt like something I should do. Globally, the livestock industry churns out more greenhouse gases than transport1, and as…
Period Apps: A Girl’s Best Friend?
“How you feelin, babe? Log it in Eve and watch the magic happen”. This is the notification I receive every morning. At 9am, as another day of lectures awaits me, I’m offended by this cheerful tone. I also don’t enjoy being called “babe”, not by a significant other, and definitely not by an app. But…
Internship at POST: Blog 4
Blog 4: Writing the POSTnote The aim of a POSTnote is to inform Parliamentarians (MPs and Peers) about an important science topic that is relevant to current or upcoming policy decisions. It is also must be concise (only 4 pages!) as MPs and Peers have to a huge amount of different topics to get through….
Internship at École Normale Supérieure: Blog 2
Blog 2: A Summer of Science in Paris Coming to the end of my two-month internship, I’ve been reflecting upon what exactly I’ve learnt from it. Of course, there are the laboratory techniques themselves: I can now state on my CV that I have experience with fancy-sounding things like immunohistochemistry and pyrosequencing, which is nice….
Internship at the Smithsonian: Blog 5
Blog 5: The Taxonomist’s Assistants So far in these posts I have practically maintained a fiction that the entirety of research is done by curators and students—however, this gives a great disservice to a class of scientist just as large, if not larger, than the curators and researchers themselves. At the Smithsonian they are called…
Internship at POST: Blog 3
Blog 3: Working in Parliament The three months during which I was interning at POST were a particularly chaotic time for UK politics. When I arrived in February 2017, people were still reeling from the results of the BREXIT vote, and that was reflected in the type of work that was being carried out by…