science wire

When Howard Florey came to Oxford in 1935 as the newly appointed Professor of Pathology, he arrived to state of the art but largely empty labs in the new Sir William Dunn School .

A new stem cell technology is to be used by Oxford University researchers to better understand the causes of Parkinson's disease. The technique will use skin samples to grow the brain cells thought to be responsible for the onset of Parkinson's disease, allowing these important neurons to be studied in detail.

It isn't everyone who has a set of holes named after them but then John Aubrey was one of the most intriguing characters to surface at Oxford University in the 17th Century. I've blogged before about the role Oxonians played in the founding of the Royal Society 350 years ago. And, whilst he is most famous for his rediscovery of the prehistoric monument at Avebury (and Stonehenge's Aubrey holes ), Aubrey was also a founding fellow of the RS.

An Oxford academic has challenged the public to help create the world's largest archive of online material concerned with Anglo-Saxon England, after being inspired by the interest shown in last year's discovery of the Staffordshire hoard. The Archive, called Project Woruldhord (Old English for 'world-hoard'), is being launched this month by Dr Stuart Lee, of the Faculty of English and Computing Services.

A new Oxford University spin-out company, Oxford Electromagnetic Solutions Limited (OxEmS), has been set up to commercialise a range of tagging and sensing technology that will help to locate and identify buried plastic pipes.

I've been looking to write about Moon Zoo for a while now: it's a new citizen science project that enables web users to become virtual lunar explorers.

The second annual World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment is being attended by former President Mikhail Gorbachev, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu and European Commissioner Janez Poto?nik.

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History, in partnership with Natural England and The Guardian , is inviting the public to name animal species which have so far only been recorded in Latin.

Scientists from Oxford University are introducing visitors to this year's Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition to the wonders of viruses and tectonic plates.

Radical cuts to social welfare spending to reduce budget deficits could cause not just economic pain but cost lives, warns an Oxford-led study published on BMJ.com.

A new, dispassionate analysis is needed of all the available data on breast cancer screening programmes and their effectiveness, says an Oxford University researcher in an article today in the BMJ medical journal.

A study of feral chickens, reported in this week's Current Biology , suggests an evolutionary battle between what's good for old roosters and what's good for their hens - which would benefit from sex with younger, more potent males.

A pioneering study in South Africa, led by Oxford University, is examining the plight of children who care for parents or relatives who have AIDS. Despite the prevalence of the disease in this region, there is little research into this 'invisible' workforce of carers and the toll that it takes on them.

OxSciBlog has been building up to the 10th anniversary of the first draft human genome on Saturday with a series of articles looking at how different areas of research have been affected by knowing our DNA code. We talk to Dr Deborah Gill of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences who, with Dr Steve Hyde, runs a group hoping to develop a gene therapy for cystic fibrosis .

Final year drawing and fine art students from the University of Oxford have turned a neglected building into an art gallery, in which they are opening up their degree submissions to the public this week.

The story comes from our friends at the Wellcome Trust who highlight work by Sam Brown of Oxford University's Department of Zoology published in Current Biology today.

An international research team has mapped out an accurate chronology of the kings of ancient Egypt using a radiocarbon analysis of short-lived plant remains from the region.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup has thrown up challenges for researchers at Oxford and Kentucky Universities. Using Google Maps they have settled scores on whether the term 'football' or 'soccer' is preferred across the world and kicked off a debate about which nation likes to talk about football the most. They discovered that of all the teams in the World Cup, Algeria has the highest proportion of user-generated references to football.

There were 451 million clinical cases of Plasmodium falciparum malaria globally in 2007, according to new research by the Malaria Atlas Project [ MAP ]. The new study was led by Simon Hay of Oxford University's Department of Zoology and is published today in PLoS Medicine . This estimate of how many people become ill because of the disease (which kills about 1m people a year) is almost double the previous one provided by the World Health Organization (it estimated 247m for 2007) and highlights the difficulties of tracking a global disease.

The dictionary in the age of the internet, slang words and the Americanisation of the English language will all be on the agenda as more than one hundred of the world's top dictionary scholars arrive in Oxford this week.

Today the team behind the CoRoT space telescope report that they have found a rare example of a brown dwarf tightly orbiting its star.

Losses and duplications of whole chunks of DNA at sites across our genomes are likely to play a role in autism spectrum disorders, suggests a new international study involving Oxford University researchers and published in the journal Nature . The Oxford team now hope to carry out a pilot study to see whether tests that look for this type of genetic change can help in the diagnosis of new cases of autism.

A new online project launched by the University of Oxford will enlist the expertise of 10,000 midwives, nurses and doctors across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East to identify ways of preventing unnecessary maternal deaths.

Mining for gold, diamonds, and precious minerals is dangerous work, but in sub-Saharan Africa the activity could be driving an entire continent's tuberculosis epidemic, a new Oxford-led study has found.

The History of England..By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian?, a spoof history written by a teenage Jane Austen.

Children responded well to the two swine flu vaccines used in the UK during last year's pandemic, a UK-wide study led by Oxford University has found. The study results, published in the British Medical Journal today, helped inform decisions made by the UK Department of Health on vaccination strategies for protecting children against swine flu.

A topping out ceremony to mark the completion of the main construction stage of a new institute at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology was carried out by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University today. The £30 million Oxford Molecular Pathology Institute (OMPI) has been designed jointly by Nightingale Associates and Make Architects.