As part of my work at the Dalton Cumbrian Facility, I had the opportunity to visit Chernobyl last month. There are few people working in the nuclear industry who don’t know what happened at the power plant near the town of Pripyat, in what is now the Ukraine, 32 years ago this week. For those…
In this new series of blogs, we chat to the academics you’ll meet, be taught by and work with during your time in the School of Mathematics. In this post, we catch up with Chair in Statistics Professor Korbinian Strimmer. We asked him about his work and what he gets up to when he can…
A team of postgrads from The University of Manchester have emerged victorious from an international competition, thanks to the creation of a 3D-printed bionic limb. They hope soon to make the design available to the public without charge. What started as (and remains) a final year Mechanical Engineering Master’s project has resulted in Alex Agboola-Dobson…
It’s the ultimate 90s movie mash-up – Arachnophobia meets Jurassic Park. And it’s happened in real life, right here at the University of Manchester. Imprisoned within a block of amber dating back to the Cretaceous period, a spider has been discovered that could provide an unparalleled insight into the evolution of everyone’s favourite creepy-crawly. And…
Since 1901, there have been 585 Nobel Prizes awarded. Do you know how many have been awarded to women? Forty-eight. It’s difficult not to feel shocked by this number, with the UN revealing that, globally, women and girls “continue to be excluded from participating fully in science”. As part of an effort to change this,…
I work in a place where robots roam the hallways, chemists explore radioactive materials and physicists work with the world’s most powerful dual-beam particle accelerator. Located between the Irish Sea and the beautiful Lake District National Park, the Dalton Cumbrian Facility is a satellite site for the University of Manchester’s Dalton Nuclear Institute. It is…
As if they weren’t content with desalinating seawater, filtering the colour from whisky and creating a new rubber for running shoes, graphene scientists have now used the 2D advanced material to mimic photosynthesis – and the potential of this breakthrough could be interstellar. Researchers led by Professor Sir Andre Geim (yes, the very same man…
Who can resist an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show when it’s a DNA results special? Well, here at The University of Manchester, we’ve just wrapped up our own DNA mystery – and the result was just as shocking. As is a popular theme on the ITV chat show, the question we wanted to answer…
There’re just days to go until Christmas and we bet you’ve already mentally checked out even if you’re still keeping up the pretence of focusing on anything that’s not Yuletide-related. Not us though. Here at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, we wanted to look at the science behind some of our greatest Christmas traditions…
At the top of Sackville Street Building is a little secret – and it’s something all of us in Manchester have a share in. Next time you walk by, look up. You might just spot the white dome that is home to the Godlee Observatory. This tiny window to the stars has been at the…
