Nyneisha Bansal, Year 11, Aylesbury High School Let me ask you a question, what does creativity mean to you? To many, it may just seem like an ordinary 5 syllable word, a quality often overlooked and undermined, yet few of us realise it is so much more. Creativity is the beautiful phenomenon of turning unheard ideas into…
Theo Hawkins, Year 11, King’s College School Wimbledon Psychologists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers have attributed scientific creativity to genius, logical method, and the influence of society. Patenting organisations have measured it in terms of originality and usefulness. Scientists themselves have considered the topic, such as when, in 1801, Humphrey Davy (1778–1829) lectured on the original…
Rania Ocho, Year 12, St Philomena’s Catholic High School for Girls When I say doctor, what do you envision? Draping white coats and blue scrubs accompanied nicely with a stethoscope, I imagine. Scopes that wrap around their necks, almost like rings to a marriage – but for a doctor, it signifies their endearing commitment to helping others….
Preesha Jain, Year 12, Chelmsford County High School for Girls Creativity, as defined by the Oxford Language, is “the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness.” In science, the name given to an individual who discovers or develops something new is a “scientist” or “inventor.” Somebody who thinks outside of the box,…
Rose Fairhurst, Year 10, Sheringham High School, Norfolk I first heard about immunotherapy from my grandfather earlier this year. He had undergone chemotherapy for his lung cancer and had experienced extreme side effects. It was not working well for him. Six months later and he is part of a medical trial using immunotherapy and is…
Hanah Ibrahim, Year 13, Pimlico Academy, London Currently living underneath the world’s oceans is a vast and deep microbial biosphere that extends hundreds of metres into the seafloor. Dr Karen Lloyd, a marine microbiologist from the University of Tennessee, is fascinated by this deep-sea world and the microbes that inhabit it, so has spent years…
Eleanor Baird, Year 12, Bablake School, Warwickshire Imagine attempting to conduct research with a 4-hour time bomb counting down in your subconscious each day. For Rabia Salihu Sa’id, a Nigerian physicist and professor of atmospheric and space-weather physics, this is a reality. Bayero University in Nigeria, where Sa’id does her research, provides her with just…
Jessie D’Urso, Year 12, Nonsuch High School for Girls, Surrey “In every moment of the day, in the middle of any day, I can become newly engaged with the world. Newly competent. There’s so much to discover!” This quote conjures to mind someone brilliant: Darwin, Hawking or Einstein, plotting their radical theories. Yet these are…
Hannah Glendell, Year 12, Cults Academy, Aberdeen We live in a world of data. Every day numbers are thrown at us from all directions: teenagers have anxiety, people will get cancer, people have died of Coronavirus. But says who? Numbers swirl around us; wildly exaggerated, spreading like Chinese whispers. The pandemic has exacerbated this problem….
Louisa Neill, Year 11, Downe House School, Berkshire Professor Francesca Happé is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at King’s College London, and for the last 30 years she has been studying autism, especially in women and the elderly. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences and is a…
