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…
By Stella Stylianides Da Silva, James Allen’s Girls’ School, London We owe a great deal for our current understanding of the immune system to a theory developed in 1957. The clonal selection theory for the formation of antibodies is considered the most important discovery in immunology in the last 100 years. In his paper “A…
