Following a spate of recent high-profile journal retractions, some scientists are questioning the integrity of the peer-review process and how flawed articles can be published in high-impact journals. But what happens when a journal article is retracted, and is it too late to truly disregard the details it contained? Let’s take a deeper look into…
Gideon Bernstein wonders if we will ever understand consciousness. Descartes famously proclaimed that his consciousness was the only thing he could be sure of. Yet despite the monumental advances of modern psychology, an explanation of how consciousness arises still eludes us. But will it eventually fall to the incoming tide of knowledge, as so many…
Charlotte Green asks which pharmaceuticals are worth developing. When people learn that I study biochemistry, a common joke is whether I’ll find a cure for cancer. As I enter my final year, my mum still thinks it should be my goal. I sometimes wonder why it’s a cure for cancer she wants, rather than dementia,…
Aditya Ghosh and Sea-Yun Pius Joung explore an unlikely source for ethical guidance. In Ethics, a central problem is what Nietzsche coined as the death of God. ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’. Unlike the triumphalist tone that New Atheists have framed this in, the original formulation was one of…
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…
