Monthly Archives: November 2011
New vaccine reduces risk of malaria
A new vaccine tested on African infants may reduce the risk of malaria by half, according to a recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine. Although the vaccine does not improve death rates and causes side effects of pain and fever, it is on the way to becoming the first vaccine ever used [...]
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CSaP Event: What challenges does the future hold for the relationship between science and policy?
Speaker: Lord Rees of Ludlow, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge Location: Judge Business School, University of Cambridge Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, was appointed President of the Royal Society in 2005 and completed his tenure a year ago. During his time at the helm, he oversaw a number of [...]
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Being bilingual may help delay Alzheimer’s disease
Speaking more than one language may help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease according to a new study published in “Cortex”. Alzheimer’s disease, the leading cause of dementia, affects about half a million people in the UK alone. It is a neurodegenerative disorder in which brains cells progressively die off. The resulting atrophy leads to [...]
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Review: The PhD Movie – ‘Around Here Everyone’s an Impostor’
The PhD Movie is finally coming to Cambridge. BlueSci’s Jonathan Lawson went to London to give us an idea of what to expect, and to interview writer and creator Jorge Cham. ‘Life is tough, and then you graduate’ Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) Comics has been an essential part of academic life for over [...]
Stars send out distress flares
Astronomers have revealed that stars send out distress flares as they’re torn apart by black holes. Most large galaxies orbit a supermassive black hole. However, how and why these huge interstellar objects grow to be millions of times the mass of our Sun remains a mystery. Studying the behaviour of junior or ‘intermediate mass’ black holes [...]
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Children, but not chimps, prefer teamwork
A new study has shown that children display a preference for cooperation that is not shared by chimpanzees. The study was conducted in two parts: the subjects were first presented with two boards of food: bananas for the chimps and gummy frogs for the children. The subject could reach one of the boards by pulling [...]
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Temporal cloaks mask our perception of reality
Through a remarkable feat of physics, researchers at Cornell University have been able to hide an event in time by using an optical fibre and a pair of so-called ‘time lenses’. The phenomenon, predicted theoretically by Martin McCall and his colleagues at Imperial College London a year ago, depends on altering the speed of light [...]
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Review: Parasite Rex (Carl Zimmer)
Sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and hundreds of other parasitic diseases plague millions of people across the world. We have no clear idea of how many parasites actually exist but we do know they make up the majority of life on earth and may out number free-living species four to one. Carl Zimmer, the author of Parasite [...]
Interview: Filming Frozen Planet – Capturing the Public Imagination