Anyone studying a science at university will have sat in many lectures where the slides of historical background contain seemingly endless photographs of affluent white men. The efforts of women in science are often overlooked due to unequal opportunities in the workplace, and lack of recognition of their achievements by the scientific community. Despite this,…
10 million people in the UK suffer from some sort of phobia. At the heart of these anxiety-related disorders are aversive memories, which are formed when the brain makes a link between an object, animal, place, or situation and a traumatic event experienced at the same time. Currently, treatment for these phobias involves gradually exposing…
Bang! A gun shot. Or the burst of a firework. Explosions, big and small, can cause delight or pain, but always manage to grab your attention. Over the centuries they have been used to win wars, break through defences, and mine deep into the earth for precious materials. But the power they have to generate…
Recent research into the gut-brain axis For every one of the human cells in our bodies, there are ten bacterial cells, meaning each one of us is, in some ways, more bacteria than human. This thought may be uncomfortable given the media’s portrayal of bacteria as inherently hostile and harmful to human health, but new…
Runner-up of the Hilary Term Schools’ Writing Competition 2020 Rosalie Ko, Year 11, Buckinghamshire “We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself.” – Greta Thunberg, Swedish climate activist and TIME Person of the…
Runner-up of the Hilary Term 2020 Schools’ Writing Competition Elizabeth Dewes, Year 11, West Midlands Since the rise of Greta Thunberg, everyone has had at least some insight into the sinister threat of climate change. We are beginning to see the catastrophic effects of our average global temperature rising, with 10 million hectares of land…
Winner of the Hilary Term 2020 Schools’ Writing Competition Louis Rush, Year 12, Yorkshire To remain or to migrate is just another iteration of the fight or flight dilemma. Society is under stress, but we have protesters in our streets instead of adrenaline in our veins. By the next decade, we will certainly have to…
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”. 25 years on, this quote from Jurassic Park by the great Jeff Goldblum rings truer than ever. While every great scientific advancement experiences some level of discussion and controversy, no field attracts more debate than that…
In the 1982 classic Bladerunner, synthetic beings on the boundary between life and artifice known as replicants serve as humanity’s slaves. Made from the same organic material as us, they are expertly bioengineered to be improved versions of the humans they are based on. Masterful manipulation of life in this way could be a reality…
It’s not about the science. In 1983, a gene from Agrobacterium (a plant-infecting bacterium) was successfully inserted into a plant cell, marking a ‘coming-of-age’ moment for plant genetic engineering. The resulting possibilities seemed endless; pest-resistant, self-fertilising and nutritionally-fortified crop varieties. But relatively little of this technology has been implemented on a global scale. Casual viewers…
