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…
Kristen and Joachim Jakobsen – a husband and wife team of deep sea explorers – have captured on video a mating pair of angler fish at 800 m in a specialized submersible craft. They spotted the creatures by chance whilst returning from a five-hour long dive, and carefully followed them in the sub, filming through…
A group of researchers has discovered that the interstitial space surrounding cells in numerous tissues such as the lungs, gut, dermis and blood vessels has a unique structure that hasn’t been described before. It has been observed that this space is made up of multiple fluid-filled sinuses that form a network through which interstitial fluid…
Figuring out the composition of the bacteria in the gut, mouth, and on the skin is very fashionable at the moment, with papers regularly linking the microbiome to an unexpected disease. However, I can’t help but wonder if microbiotics isn’t the magic wand we were hoping for. Will it stand the test of time? Studying…
The first issue of the Oxford Scientist is here! It’s jam-packed with some of the most fascinating famous ‘firsts’ of science, from neanderthals to quantum teleportation. Pick up a copy from college common rooms or university science departments now!
