science wire

30 Apr 2013 Manchester retained its University Challenge title last night, beating University College, London 190 - 140 in the televised final.

The latest research into the emergence of printmaking technology in early modern Europe is challenging accepted thinking about the development of colour printing.

Historians are today launching an online resource that will provide a permanent and publicly accessible record of the letters of one of Elizabethan England's most remarkable figures.

To mark one of the most important medical developments to come out of the University of Glasgow in the twentieth century, a new book has been published.

27 April, 1915 "We hear that our men are continuing to make good progress, in spite of the fact of having fought continuously since Sunday with only biscuits to eat.

Four UCLA faculty members are among an esteemed group of 175 of scholars, artists and scientists from the United States and Canada to receive 2013 Guggenheim Fellowships.

Winterer, a scholar of the early Americas with a joint appointment in Classics, will lead the Stanford Humanities Center starting next fall.

People should take historical and cultural influences into account before forming opinions about those who spit in public, an academic has suggested.

At a distance it looks like three lads are flying a toy helicopter over the rune stones on the university quadrangle in Lund.

Sussex art historian to launch London tapestry exhibition A Sussex art historian is to give the opening speech at the launch on Wednesday (17 April) of a London exhibition of tapestries created by one of the University's partner institutions.

Newly-discovered food recipes from a 12 th century Durham Priory manuscript have been found to predate the earliest known ones by 150 years.

In more than three decades as editor and publisher of The Nation , Victor Navasky witnessed a staff uprising just once.

Sussex digital project shares 1980s views of Thatcher's Britain A University of Sussex digital project offers fascinating insights into the social history and cultural changes as experienced by those living during the 1980s in Thatcher's Britain.

Through a digital analysis of correspondence from travelers on the famed European "Grand Tour," classicist Giovanna Ceserani is discovering how international travel fostered cultural and academic trends in the 18th century.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. The Maya are famous for their complex, intertwined calendric systems, and now one calendar, the Maya Long Count, is empirically calibrated to the modern European calendar, according to an international team of researchers. "The Long Count calendar fell into disuse before European in the Maya area," said Douglas J. Kennett, professor of environmental archaeology, Penn State.

A new book by Adam Geczy , an artist and a lecturer at the Sydney College of the Arts , is the first comprehensive survey of Orientalism in fashion.

The "City Beneath the City" installation at the Stanford Archaeology Center combines history and art for an insightful examination of local Bay Area history.

The 'Iron Lady' may have been more vulnerable and isolated than many people understood according to the Professor of Parliamentary Government and Governance at the University of Sheffield.

The Old Bailey Online celebrates its tenth birthday this month (15 April 2013) after attracting over 34 million page views since it went live in 2003.

05 Apr 2013 University of Manchester archaeologists have started the excavation of an enormous building complex in Iraq, thought to be around 4,000 years old. The team, directed by Professor Stuart Campbell and Dr Jane Moon, both from Manchester, and independent archaeologist Robert Killick, first spotted the amazing structure - thought to be an administrative complex serving one of the world's earliest cities- on satellite.

More than 100 high-resolution images from the Cantor are now available for in-depth research and examination.

Looking down from orbit is an attractive way of monitoring historical sites in remote or politically unstable regions - and can even help archaeologists to make new discoveries. The ancient city of Samarra was a powerful Islamic capital during the ninth century, located in what is today Iraq. It is the only surviving Islamic capital that retains its original plan, architecture and arts, although only about 20% of the site has been excavated.

The question caused consternation. Several decades ago when Peter Conn and his wife filled out paperwork to adopt a baby girl from Korea, one of the questions on a state government form was about the number and names of their "natural" children.

A letter written by the dying Captain Scott - one of only two remaining in private hands - can be revealed in full for the first time after being acquired by the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.

A 320 million-year-old fossilised skull - found in Newsham, Blyth in Northumberland in the 18th century by a local grocer - has undergone state-of-the-art CT scanning by a University of Bristol researcher at Newcastle's Freeman Hospital.

The Industrial Revolution is seen as the spark that lit Europe's economic prosperity. In her analysis of markets over many hundreds of years, economist Dr Victoria Bateman presents a compelling argument for a broader global perspective.

The Director of a national research programme which aimed to significantly advance our understanding of religion and society will outline its impact in a keynote lecture at the University.

They are most famous for being violent invaders of foreign shores but a new book by a University of Nottingham Viking expert shows they were also poetry lovers with a wicked sense of humour! 'Viking

New research into Thonis-Heracleion, a sunken port-city that served as the gateway to Egypt in the first millennium BC, is being examined at an international conference at the University of Oxford. The port city, situated 6.5 kilometres off today's coastline, was one of the biggest commercial hubs in the Mediterranean before the founding of Alexandria.

Press Release from Umeå University Two researchers and historians of ideas at Umeå Studies in Science, Technology and Environment (USSTE), Umeå University, has newly published an article in the prestigious journal History and Technology. Martin Hultman - We often hear that technology is advancing so fast that society cannot keep up.

The rattle and hum of human history is the subject of Noise - an "ear-opening" major BBC Radio 4 series that begins on Monday (18 March 2013), written and presented by University of Sussex David Hendy.

From the chaste husband-seekers of the Edwardian era to the binge-drinking, sexually liberated ladettes of the new millennium, the past 100 years have seen major changes in the lives of young women in Britain.

For many years Paul Kosmetatos worked in the City of London's financial sector, where he became fascinated by the unfolding of periodic crises.

The story of a "secret army" of Kent residents trained to fend off a Nazi invasion of England is the subject of one of four fascinating University of Sussex projects being funded by a new cultural initiative.

III. "Fear," one informant told Studs Terkel when the latter conducted an oral history of the 1930s, "unsettled the securities, apparently false securities that people had.

At 4:30 a.m. on a Friday in April 1861, a shell from a 10-inch rebel mortar burst 100 feet over Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, beginning a bombardment that lasted nearly 34 hours.

Some of the world's oldest engravings of the human form - prehistoric rock art from the Italian Alps - have been brought to life by the latest digital technology at Cambridge Unviersity's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

During a rare visit to the UK, a world-renowned American composer told an enthralled audience at the University of Sussex yesterday (7 March) how he came to write a work about the events surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

PA 68/13 It's cheap, healthy and sustainable and its provenance can easily be traced back to its free-range, organic roots.

Cardiff is one of 45 universities to have been awarded funding to help arts and humanities PhD students develop skills in relation to the wider impact of their research.

An online database launched today, 5 March, provides an oral history of Mongolia, as told by 600 Mongolian citizens who look back over their lives during the nation's turbulent recent history.