News
New analysis finds climate change flood risk is greater than previously thought
A recent study from Climate Central, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests as many as 150 million people live on land that will be underwater at high tide by 2050, even if global warming is kept to the Paris Agreement target of 2C – a threefold increase on previous estimates. Previous estimates of flood…
Finding the ‘Nemo effect’: no evidence that animal movies drive demand for pets, say researchers
Following the release of ‘Finding Nemo’, numerous global news providers, including the BBC and CNN, reported that the movie’s popularity was driving an increase in demand for clownfish as pets and threatening wild populations. This effect, dubbed the ‘Nemo effect’ by media outlets, was so widely reported that it became conventional wisdom amongst amateur animal…
Is international talent the key to the UK’s future success?
Sponsored Earlier this year, International Trade Secretary, Liam Fox and Education Secretary, Damian Hinds announced the Government’s ambition to increase the number of international students choosing to complete higher education in the UK by 30%, to 600,000 per annum by 2030. Oxford Royale Academy (ORA), a leading provider of summer schools at Oxford and Cambridge…
Keeping Cells in Line
Ligaments, tendons and other musculoskeletal soft issues not only are differentiated by their cellular and extra-cellular constituents, but also the organization of these constituents. While we are able to create medical products through printing living cells, the technology in engineering tissues for common injuries is yet to be around. “One challenge has been organizing the…
Anti-conformity creates a new conformity
Complexity science explains why efforts to reject the mainstream merely result in a new conformity. Despise anything that is “too mainstream”? Want to make a countercultural statement with an alternative style? Your one-of-a-kind look often ironically ends up pretty much the same as your counterculture peers. Intrigued by this counterintuitive phenomena, mathematician Jonathan Touboul at…
Liquid: a liquid filter
Water filtration for human consumption and industrial wastewater purification accounts for huge electricity consumption and CO2 emissions. Passing water through a porous membrane to filter out particles larger than water molecules is a common water processing method. A problem with this filtration method is that membranes are susceptible to fouling (clogging by the filtrates). To…
Truly recycling plastic with reversible polymer chemistry
In the ideal world, recycling plastics should break the polymers back to monomers, its original building blocks. Monomers could then be made into new plastics over and over. The team from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California brought us one step closer to the dream of closed-loop, zero-waste plastics. Researchers utilised a family of…
How the search on your window monitors global biodiversity outside the window
Sitting in your room, typing wikipedia.org/wiki/…/, you are actually helping scientists to monitor species outside the window. Recently in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, the University of Oxford, the University of Birmingham and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev collectively published their investigation on how Wikipedia pageview records correlates to seasonal patterns in nature. We had…
The Big Freeze: scientists obstructed by the US government shutdown
Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images By Abigail Pavey Temperatures plummet across North America but the United States federal government has been suffering from a more chilling type of freeze – federal paralysis. In pursuit of his wall, President Donald Trump started the longest government shutdown in modern US history and as a result, science across…
Divers get up close and personal with largest great white shark
Photograph: @Juansharks/Juan Oliphant/AFP/Getty Images By Laura Perry Images of Deep Blue – the largest great white shark in the world – took the internet by storm in January. But is touching a 6-metre apex predator ever a good idea? And what is being done to help protect these real-life sea monsters? The film ‘Deep Blue…