Past Issues
How to fight climate despair
While institutions across the world are accepting the need for climate action, for individuals who have read a constant stream of “climate doomism” for years it’s becoming too much. Nell Miles tells us how to fight this climate despair.
Why diversity matters: an interview with Dr Alex Ramadan
Georgia Shave speaks with Dr Alex Ramadan, a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Oxford Physics department about the impact of including marginalised people in Physics.
How close are we to fusion power?
By Molly Hammond This article was originally published in The Oxford Scientist Michaelmas Term 2021 edition, Change. Nuclear fusion is supposedly ‘always 30 years away’. It was however first theorised about a hundred years ago. What has changed in a century of research—and are we now, really, only 30 years away? In 1920, Arthur Eddington…
Fishing Through Geological Time
By Matthew Sutton This article was originally published in The Oxford Scientist Michaelmas Term 2021 edition, Change. Earth’s oceans are an immense and foreboding place. They occupy 71% of the surface area of the planet and have a total volume exceeding 1.3 billion cubic kilometres. Occupying every corner of every part of this gargantuan biome…
The same but different—why I’m not my twin sister
Grace Kirman explores how her choices and the environment alter her epigenetics to make her different from her twin sister.
A new age of structural biology?
By Rhian Gruar This article was originally published in The Oxford Scientist Michaelmas Term 2021 edition, Change. On the 26 June 2000, President Bill Clinton announced the completion of the first draft of the Human Genome Project (HGP) to the world, ushering in a new age of scientific understanding. The HGP was a decade-long endeavour…
Progress, revived: can evolution change things for the better?
By Giovanni Mussini This article was originally published in The Oxford Scientist Michaelmas Term 2021 edition, Change. In one of the last and most accomplished of his works, Giacomo Leopardi, the 19th century giant of Italian poetry, turns to the natural world to ridicule le magnifiche sorti e progressive–the magnificent and progressive fates–of humanity: as…
Why genetic research is too white
Ever since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, genetic research has developed in leaps and bounds. However, despite genomics being at the forefront of the scientific field, it faces one major flaw; genetic research is too white.
A Tainted Past – the History of HIV
When discussing HIV, the term ‘the gay community’ often crops up. The gay community ‘accepts’ or ‘rejects’ something, it becomes enraged at lack of progress or vilification, it fights for its rights. What this terminology does is reduce a necessarily diverse community into a homogenous whole.
A cure for Alzheimer’s?
Alzheimer’s disease is the leading cause of dementia worldwide. Could Aducanumab end the 19-year drought on Alzheimer’s treatments?