Following the release of ‘Finding Nemo’, numerous global news providers, including the BBC and CNN, reported that the movie’s popularity was driving an increase in demand for clownfish as pets and threatening wild populations. This effect, dubbed the ‘Nemo effect’ by media outlets, was so widely reported that it became conventional wisdom amongst amateur animal…
We will be announcing our next school science writing competition very shortly. Check back here for more information soon! We are thrilled to announce the winners of the MT2019 Oxford Scientist national school science writing competition! Through our science writing competitions, we hope to encourage school students to think about science outside of the classroom,…
Water filtration for human consumption and industrial wastewater purification accounts for huge electricity consumption and CO2 emissions. Passing water through a porous membrane to filter out particles larger than water molecules is a common water processing method. A problem with this filtration method is that membranes are susceptible to fouling (clogging by the filtrates). To…
Sitting in your room, typing wikipedia.org/wiki/…/, you are actually helping scientists to monitor species outside the window. Recently in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, the University of Oxford, the University of Birmingham and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev collectively published their investigation on how Wikipedia pageview records correlates to seasonal patterns in nature. We had…
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Trinity Term 2019 Oxford Scientist national school science writing competition! Through our science writing competitions, we hope to encourage school students to think about science outside of the classroom, and give them the opportunity to explore their own scientific interests in a creative way. This term,…
Atreyi Chakrabarty (St. Cross College, DPhil in Interdisciplinary Bioscience) in conversation with Professor Dorothy Bishop (Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford) More and more scientists are starting to doubt the nature of their own playing field. Their colleagues’ studies published in acclaimed journals, but the key findings mysteriously never seem to materialise when others try to…
Image created by Cezary Tomczak, Maxime Lorant [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] (Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons Licence) Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) impacts people who have experienced extreme traumatic events such as war or torture. Sufferers are vulnerable to involuntary memories of traumatic events, colloquially called “flashbacks”, which are a distressing symptom of the condition. A recent…
100 years ago, the Representation of the People Act 1918 allowed some women over 30 to vote in the UK. To celebrate this, Oxford University Museum of Natural History’s current exhibition, Women In Science, explores the life and work of 14 female scientists. From Marie Curie to Barbara McClintock, these women are among the most…
![Image from: Jonathan Bailey / NHGRI [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/oxsci.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Circulating-tumor-dna_image.jpg?resize=600%2C400&ssl=1 "A 10-minute, universal blood test for cancer")
Researchers at the University of Queensland, Australia have developed a blood test that can detect whether a patient has any type of cancer within as little as 10 minutes. Although still in the initial stages of testing, this cheap and simple method could help clinicians to diagnose cancer before symptoms appear, when the widest range…
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Hilary Term 2019 Oxford Scientist national school science writing competition! Through our science writing competitions, we hope to encourage school students to think about science outside of the classroom, and give them the opportunity to explore their own scientific interests in a creative way. This term,…
