News
ESA’s exploration of the Sun: What can ‘Solar Orbiter’ teach us?
At 5:03 CET on Monday 10th February, a NASA Atlas V4 11 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying with it ESA’s aptly named latest mission: Solar Orbiter. Within an hour, the spacecraft detached from the rocket, and began flying solo, carefully guided by a team on the ground in Germany. Since then, the…
Ramakrishnan and his ribosome – a review
Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society and 2009 Nobel Prize winner, is already well known in the scientific community for his publications about the ribosome. What I wasn’t expecting however, was that his part-memoir, part-popular science book contained far more about the pace, people and progress of science than could ever be gleaned from…
Will the robots of the future be alive?
In the 1982 classic Bladerunner, synthetic beings on the boundary between life and artifice known as replicants serve as humanity’s slaves. Made from the same organic material as us, they are expertly bioengineered to be improved versions of the humans they are based on. Masterful manipulation of life in this way could be a reality…
Aberrant antibodies: don’t always trust what it says on the tin
Antibodies are proteins generated by the immune system capable of recognising short peptide fragments (known as epitopes) with a remarkably high degree of specificity. This specificity makes them a powerful tool for research, allowing us to identify, track, and quantify specific proteins in a wide range of assays. Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) can be generated for…
The talking dead: scientists recreate 3000-year-old voice
The voice of an Ancient Egyptian priest who fell silent over 3000 years ago has been brought back to life thanks to a team of scientists from Royal Holloway and the University of York. The group, part of the ‘Voices of the Past’ Project, created a 3-D printed model of the man’s vocal tract constructed…
Wuhan Coronavirus: What we do know, and what we don’t
Since China first announced the emergence of a new virus, 2019-novel coronavirus or 2019-nCOV, the pathogen has spread and international cases have emerged. This virus is in the same family as both the common cold and the more deadly MERS and SARS viruses. Governments and health organisations are now mobilising to contain the spread of…
Dunn School of Pathology Art Competition – a review.
Since 2014, The Sir William Dunn School of Pathology and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art have run a collaborative competition which aims to draw together the fields of the arts and the sciences. Mihaela Man and Olivia Williamson won the 2019 competition with a two-part piece which has been installed in the…
Chalk Talks, 2nd December
Nathan Walemba The quantum computer was first theorised by Richard Feynman in 1982. Nathan Walemba, a 1st year undergraduate studying Materials Science, gave his Chalk Talk on what a quantum computer is and how far they have come since their original proposal. Feynman’s suggestion sparked a frantic race between companies such as Google, D-Wave and…
Physics Society Talks: The Stratosphere
Why should we care about the stratosphere? Such is the question Simon Clark presented us with at the latest of the Physics society’s weekly talks. Former undergraduate at St Peter’s College Oxford and prominent Youtuber, Clark has made a name for himself as a powerful and effective science communicator and it becomes clear why as…
Nobel Prizes 2019
Where would the modern world be without efficient, rechargeable sources of power? The 2019 Nobel Prizes recognised transformative work to tackle this problem carried out in the Oxford Department of Chemistry. John Goodenough’s work in Oxford built upon the ideas of his co-recipient Whittingham, who had been amongst the first to use a material that…