science wire

Is London turning into a city where football clubs such as Arsenal and Chelsea run schools, Londoners commonly convert their roofs into "micro-farms" and people are subject to separate migration laws to the rest of the UK?

UCL researchers and those who support their grant applications to research councils are to be congratulated, writes Professor David Price, UCL Vice-Provost (Research) .

The resting pulse rate of UK pre-teens may have risen by up to two beats a minute during the past 30 years.

UCL is to establish a new Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty with an initial $250,000 grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The new Centre will address the ongoing intellectual and policy challenges unleashed by the global financial crisis, and will be the first in the world to focus on why individuals and groups think and act in specific ways when faced with uncertainty.

A UCL-led project dedicated to empowering the urban poor to design and implement activities to adapt to climate change in Maputo, Mozambique, has been recognised as one of the 2013 Lighthouse Activities 2013 under the Momentum for Change initiative of the United Nations.

The search for UK volunteers willing to donate their genome and health data to science has begun with the launch today of the Personal Genome Project UK.

Women with ovarian cancer that has returned had their life extended by almost three months after treatment with a drug called cediranib, according to trial results presented by researchers from the Cancer Research UK and UCL Cancer Trials Centre.

UK immigrants who arrived since 2000 are less likely to receive benefits and less likely to live in social housing than UK natives. What's more, over the decade from 2001 to 2011, they made a considerable positive net contribution to the UK's fiscal system, and thus helped to relieve the fiscal burden on UK-born workers.

The government's target to cut net migration to the UK to below 100,000 by 2015 is neither a useful tool nor a measure of policy effectiveness, according to a new discussion paper by UCL academics.

Two separate research papers by UCL academics published today highlight the evidence of the fiscal costs and benefits of recent immigration to the UK, as well as the difficulties with the government's net migration target. Recent Immigration to the UK: New evidence of the fiscal costs and benefits UK immigrants who arrived since 2000 are less likely to receive benefits and less likely to live in social housing than UK natives.

After its first run of more than three months, operating a mile underground in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a new experiment named LUX has proven itself the most sensitive dark matter detector in the world. LUX stands for Large Underground Xenon experiment. The LUX scientific collaboration includes 17 research universities and national laboratories in the United States, the UK, and Portugal.

The eyes of Arctic reindeer change colour through the seasons from gold to blue, adapting to extreme changes of light levels in their environment and helping detect predators.

The Slade School of Fine Art has a fascinating, but currently incomplete, collection of annual class photographs dating from 1931.

Inspired by how dolphins hunt with bubble nets, engineers at UCL, the University of Southampton and Cobham Technical Services, have developed a new kind of radar that can detect hidden surveillance equipment and explosives. The twin inverted pulse radar (TWIPR) is able to distinguish true 'targets', such as certain types of electronic circuits that may be used in explosive or espionage devices, from 'clutter' (other metallic items like pipes, drinks cans, nails for example) that may be mistaken for a genuine target by traditional radar and metal detectors.

Early human evolution was driven by short pulses of rapid environmental change in East Africa, according to new research from academics at UCL and The University of Manchester. The study, which is published in the journal PLOS ONE, has shown for the first time the link between the waxing and waning of huge lakes in the East African Rift valley and the brain expansion and migration of early human species.

UCL is part of a consortium that has been awarded £7.6 million to provide academic researchers with access to government data.

A new competition asks medical professionals, people with diabetes and members of the general public to enter a competition to share their mistakes.

Researchers from UCL have found that children with irregular bedtimes are more likely to have behavioural difficulties. The study, which is published in the journal Pediatrics, found that irregular bedtimes could disrupt natural body rhythms and cause sleep deprivation, undermining brain maturation and the ability to regulate certain behaviours.

This week saw the most ambitious test yet of the European Space Agency's ExoMars Rover, when - remotely controlled by scientists the UK - it explored the Atacama Desert in South America.

Peter Higgs, the UK-based physicist, has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics along with Belgian François Englert.

A free smartphone app that allows people to explore the relationships between words in text via an intuitive interface was launched by academics at UCL this week. Designed by a team from UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) and the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), the app allows the visualisation of any text from politicians' speeches, to academic papers and newspaper articles, enabling people to unearth the themes and hidden uses of language within text through the generation of graphics and statistics.

Many of the elite sportsmen and women who competed at the London 2012 Olympic Games had poor levels of oral health similar to those experienced by the most disadvantaged populations. 18 per cent of athletes surveyed said their oral health was having a negative impact on their performance. The research, which was led by Professor Ian Needleman at the UCL Eastman Dental Institute, is published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine .

The largest study of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) genomes to date reveals new information about how MERS-CoV is evolving, and its likely patterns of transmission. The work is published in The Lancet today.

A meta-analysis of more than two million women led by researchers at the UCL Institute of child Health (ICH) has revealed that women with a known history of anorexia at any point prior or during pregnancy, have babies with a lower birth weight than healthy mothers. The study, published in Epidemiologic Reviews , is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), and is the first large scale review of its kind, taking into account 14 existing studies carried out between 1999 and 2012 across several Western countries, including the UK.

Dr Matt Jones (UCL History) is spending three weeks travelling the Scottish Highlands with a mobile cinema, to find out how film-goers remember and react to films from the 1960s.

A new study of the funding awarded to antimicrobial resistance research projects in the UK calls for political leadership and sustained and targeted spending Although emergence of antimicrobial resistance severely threatens our future ability to treat many infections, the UK infection-research spend targeting this important area is still unacceptably small, say a team of researchers led by Michael Head (UCL Infection and Population Health).

The Chirp app, which has been a number one download in the App Store in countries including the UK, German and China and is today also launched on Android, enables people to share data such as photos, web links and text through two-second audio clips which sound like digital birdsong.

Scientists and conservators have developed a new method to diagnose painting canvases from the back, without disturbing a single fibre, to see if they can withstand the stress of handling and travel. Using the method - which is similar to the way doctors measure blood sugar without the need for needles - scientists examined 12 paintings by the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.

An exhibition of installations made in response to planetary science goes on display today at UCL. Exoplanets, all-sky surveys, the aurora borealis and the search for extra-terrestrial life are just some of the themes that are represented in the installations made by seven contemporary artists.

The courts - two of which are in the Talacre sports centre in Kentish Town, with three other indoor and two outdoor courts available for use at the UCL Academy in Swiss Cottage - were opened with a demonstration from the UK Wallball team.