science wire

If you're anything like us, you've been enjoying the BBC's The Story of Science series with Michael Mosley, which charts the progress of science through the centuries [see sample clip above]. You may remember from an earlier post that Pietro Corsi of Oxford University's Faculty of History was one of three leading historians of science that acted as consultants to the series.

Voting for the Professor of Poetry post at Oxford University begins today and will be open until Wednesday, 16 June at noon.

Four researchers from the University of Oxford have been elected as new Fellows of the Royal Society. The new Fellows are Professor Philip Candelas, Professor Georg Gottlob, Professor Robert C Griffiths and Professor Ian Hickson. Professor Philip Candelas is Rouse-Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, and a Fellow of Wadham College.

They float like tiny jewels encased in stone: most are only a few millimetres or centimetres long but full of incredible detail - boasting tiny tentacles, eyes, legs, and forceps-like pincers.

Kishorn and Shannon, two young people interviewed for the website www.youthhealthtalk.org, along with Dr Ann McPherson, medical director of the Health Experiences Research Group at Oxford (2nd from left) and Prue Leith, ex-chair of The School Food Trust.

'What was life like for wartime refugees living in Oxford?' is the question posed by University researchers.

The debates between Europhiles and Eurosceptics will be nothing new to those familiar with the longstanding debate over Spain's role in a modern Europe.

With new fossil fuel power stations being built every week, and the idea of burying CO2 [ carbon sequestration ] regarded by many scientists as unproven or even unworkable, coming up with an alternative solution to what to do with CO2 is more pressing than ever.

It's here that an international team, including Oxford University scientists, are building an array that, linked up with stations in the Netherlands, Germany, and France will form LOFAR , one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes.

Poetry is firmly in the spotlight at Oxford University this week as the nominations for the prestigious Professor of Poetry post closed at 4pm on Wednesday 5 May.

To help mark the centenary of Dorothy Hodgkin's birth a special play will be performed next week at Oxford University's Lady Margaret Hall.

Most voters on 6 May will be staring at a UK ballot paper, but visitors to the Pitt Rivers can see a more unusual election item.

Four Oxford University researchers have been elected as Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences. The new Fellows are Professor Lars Fugger, Professor Antony Galione, Professor Ian Hickson and Professor Patrik Rorsman.

As part of researching a new children's book Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University's Department of Zoology has been finding out.

Ecologists and scientists will gather in Wytham Woods today to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its designation as a Site of Special Scientific Interest [ SSSI ].

An ambitious initiative to raise major research funding at Oxford University has defied the economic downturn by raising $100m to support groundbreaking research on key global problems - and the challenge has been met well within the year deadline originally set.

A new BBC series starts tonight on BBC2 at 9pm. Presented by Michael Mosley, The Story of Science is an ambitious project: it aims to chart the progress of science through the centuries.

The Hubble Space Telescope is 20 years old this week and, to mark this anniversary, astronomers are asking volunteers to help classify thousands of new images of galaxies.

As part of efforts to understand the impact of the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano an Oxford team have been using LIDAR to search for airborne ash over southern England.

One of the earliest originals of Magna Carta in existence, belonging to the Bodleian Library, is the latest object to be caught up in the travel disruption caused by volcanic ash - and New Yorkers are the beneficiaries.

A UK research group dedicated to work on a rare genetic condition that turns muscle to bone will be established thanks to a donation that takes the University of Oxford's fundraising campaign, Oxford Thinking , past the £800m mark .

Oxford University is to hold the world's first interdisciplinary conference on deserts at the School of Geography and the Environment on April 15-16.

Susan, of Oxford University's Oxford University's WildCRU , is leading research into the agile gibbon and wild cat species for the OuTrop project .

The firm was founded in 2009 by Mark Cummins and James Philbin, two graduate students from Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, to commercialise technology stemming from their doctoral research.

The fourteen and fifteen year olds have been taking part in a free spring residential activity at the University, but the peace of the college quad was shattered on Tuesday when the student union president was found dead and everyone became a suspect in his murder.

While mothers are still doing most of the work, fathers are catching up. British dads are spending almost 30 minutes a day longer on child care as well as more time doing the housework, DIY and shopping in 2000 than in 1975, according to the research.

With healthcare set to be one of the central items on the upcoming election agenda, an Oxford report on how to encourage employee engagement and increased public benefits in the NHS will add new substance to the debate.

Oxford University is involved in a research project to unearth 30,000 year old climate records, before they are lost forever.

'The simplest black holes are objects with a singularity in the centre and that are surrounded by an ' event horizon ',' explains Cigdem Issever of Oxford University's Department of Physics.

Scientists at the Universities of Oxford, Southampton and St George's, University of London are asking people with and without Alzheimer's disease to come forward with examples of their writing as part of a study to identify changes in language use that occur with the condition. 'We're encouraging people to go to their attics, rifle the back of drawers and search through piles of paperwork, to wherever they keep their old diaries, letters and notebooks,' says Dr Celeste de Jager of the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing (OPTIMA) at the University of Oxford.

In the second of a series of articles marking the 10th anniversary of the Human Genome Project [ HPG ] , OxSciBlog talks to Professor Chris Ponting of the MRC Functional Genomics Unit at Oxford University.