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…
Brazilian scientists have recorded the highest-ever Antarctic temperature. At midday on 9 February, air temperature at the Marambio research base hit 20.75ᵒC. This is the first time that a temperature exceeding 20ᵒC has been recorded anywhere within the Antarctic climate zone – the area further than 60 degrees south of the equator. Marambio is located…
“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…
Bitcoin – it is everywhere. Last year was the tenth anniversary of the famous Bitcoin whitepaper by “Satoshi Nakamoto”, but the future of cryptocurrencies remains uncertain as it is shrouded in skepticism and a lack of familiarity outside of the tech community. However, Bitcoin’s underpinning technology, blockchain, has a rather more optimistic outlook. In a…
At 5:03 CET on Monday 10th February, a NASA Atlas V4 11 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying with it ESA’s aptly named latest mission: Solar Orbiter. Within an hour, the spacecraft detached from the rocket, and began flying solo, carefully guided by a team on the ground in Germany. Since then, the…
Most researchers’ response to the word ‘collaboration’ is overwhelmingly positive. Many of the most influential scientific breakthroughs that have gone on to shape today’s scientific landscape have been the product of collaborations: Gates and Allen, the Wright brothers, and Watson, Crick and Franklin, to name a few. The global value of collaboration can be seen…
In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s Valentine’s day. And what better way to celebrate love than to reduce it down to data and statistics. There aren’t many things sexier than a colour coded bar chart after all. Days like today can be tricky for those in long-distance relationships. And in our increasingly connected world, more…
‘Wild Things’ is the latest venture from The House of Improv. In this improvised comedy, the team address human interactions with an endangered animal which is conjured out of thin air by the audience. In the Tuesday performance, this animal was the creaky-tailed hippopotamus. Set in Creaky-Tailed Hippopotamus Town, the play followed the stories of…
Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society and 2009 Nobel Prize winner, is already well known in the scientific community for his publications about the ribosome. What I wasn’t expecting however, was that his part-memoir, part-popular science book contained far more about the pace, people and progress of science than could ever be gleaned from…
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…
