By Jemima Longcake, Year 12, Kirkbie Kendal School, Cumbria They may not wear the pristine white lab coat, or work in the esteemed laboratories of CERN or Fermilab. They do not lecture thousands in auditoriums, but they they lecture hundreds in our school lab rooms and classrooms. They are, for many of us, our first…
By Zain Ali, Year 11, King Edward VI Aston School, West Midlands It is flowing through you as you read this. Composed of red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma, blood is arguably the most important tissue in the human body. Throughout history, an uncountable amount of people have died because they bled…
By Max Peacock, Year 13, Colyton Grammar School, Devon In 2016 the world health organisation published a study into the global prevalence of type 1&2 diabetes. The study estimated that there are currently 422 million people living with some form of diabetes, over 100 million of whom are entirely dependent on insulin injections to live…
By Phoebe Hall, Year 12, Ripon Grammar School, Yorkshire Mary Anning was born in 1799, a time when women were expected only to raise families, and most girls had very little formal education. Anning was brought up in Lyme Regis, a seaside town that is now known as part of the Jurassic Coast. As well…
By Anna Grube, Year 11, Alleyn’s School, London A young scientist, Daniel Burd from Waterloo, Ontario, shocked the world when he made a major scientific discovery to help solve the growing problem of plastic pollution. The 17-year-old student won the Canada-wide science fair in 2008 with a study on plastic-degrading microorganisms, capable of breaking down…
By Alexander James, Sir John Deane’s College, Cheshire Oxygen is vital to life and is used in numerous industrial processes. However, there was a time when the existence of oxygen as a concept, let alone as an element, was completely unknown. One of the early scientific theories of combustion was called the Phlogiston Theory, developed…
By Banda Chisomo, King Edward IV Five Ways School, Birmingham Picture this: a patient has a large gunshot wound to their lower abdomen and they had excessive haemorrhaging before suffering from myocardial infarction and flatlining. They are rushed to the accident and emergency ward where the doctors assess the extent of the damage and they…
by Ivan Komarov, Wellington College, Berkshire While Copernicus and Galileo often receive the credit for their ideas, it was Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) who discovered and demonstrated that the Earth orbits the Sun. In his 1609 work, “The New Astronomy”, Kepler destroyed the Aristotelian cosmography of perfect forms and unknowable causes, forever changed man’s sense of…
By Natalie Stevenson, Sandbach High School and Sixth Form College, Cheshire There has been one question which has plagued humankind throughout possibly the entirety of history – are we alone in the Universe? Although we still might not have the answer, advances in technology and space exploration has meant that we are slowly edging closer…
By Joseph Brennan, St. Benedict’s Catholic High School, Cumbria For any astronomer or curious person looking at the stars, the natural thought that arises has been the same for millennia: are there planets orbiting those stars like Earth orbits the Sun, and do they have the capability to support life? The detection of exoplanets is…
