News & articles

We now know of almost 5,000 planets outside the Solar System. If you were to picture what it would be like on one of these distant worlds, or exoplanets, your mental image would probably include a parent star – or more than one, especially if you’re a Star Wars fan.

A second year OU PhD student was part of the excavation of the largest most complete marine reptile skeleton ever found in Britain.

Don’t look now – but we are currently experiencing a rash of stories about a forthcoming global catastrophe. But in a change from reports of pandemics and climate change, this global catastrophe is produced by the impact of a giant asteroid. Or comet. Or both.

Astronomers ended 2021 on a high with the launch on December 25 of the James Webb Space Telescope, a joint mission between the European Space Agency, Nasa and the Canadian Space Agency. But what else lies in store for space science this year? Here are a few missions to watch out for.

Professor David Gowing from the OU’s Floodplain Meadows Partnership argues governments are missing a huge opportunity by failing to make sustainable agriculture a crucial part of their policy response to the climate crisis.

The forthcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope offers unprecedented new opportunities for astronomers. It’s also a timely opportunity to reflect on what previous generations of telescopes have shown us.

Just over a year ago, material from the Japanese Hayabusa 2 mission to Asteroid (162173) Ryugu arrived back on Earth . And this week, the first two papers reporting analysis of the material have been published in Nature Astronomy.

Would you electrocute an innocent stranger if you were told to do so by someone in a position of authority? This is the dilemma hundreds of US adults were presented with in Stanley Milgram’s famous and controversial “obedience to authority” experiments that ran from 1961 to 1962.

The Bright Ideas in Health Awards has honoured Dr Siobhan Campbell and Dr Sally Blackburn-Daniels for an innovative pilot scheme that encouraged NHS healthcare workers to try creative writing to enhance their wellbeing during the coronavirus pandemic.  

An OU academic has received almost £370,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to conduct research into geometry and number theory.