Yuki Okoda has always been fascinated by the great mysteries of the universe. Inspired by her high school physics teacher’s stories on the theory of relativity, elementary particle experiments and exoplanets, Okoda pursued a career in astronomy. She could never have anticipated what would happen next. In September 2018, as a second-year Master’s student at the University of Tokyo, the young astronomer became the first person to discover a dense disk of material around a newborn star. The discov

“I think the one thing that almost everyone can agree on from Alan Turing’s legacy is that his life experience really highlighted the injustice and unequal treatment of people around the world,” says James Turing, over a Zoom call in mid-January lockdown. The great-nephew of the world-renowned mathematician and computer scientist is looking to keep his legacy alive — through a charitable Trust he created from his student bedroom eleven years ago. The Turing Trust aims to address the digital di

The Boston scientists on a mission to remove bias in US scientific hiring “One major barrier to scientific innovation is workforce development,” says Elizabeth Wu, one of three scientists behind a new platform that seeks to remove bias in scientific hiring. Wu, alongside co-founder Danika Khong are setting their sights high, looking to address the $1B annual loss from inefficiencies in scientific recruiting in the US. The Boston-based scientists set up Scismic in November 2017, initially as a

“It is like a library or a public park. A temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others,” states Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales. When the US entrepreneur first mooted the idea of an online encyclopaedia (in 2001) which could be created by allowing anyone to build pages on any topic, it seemed a fairly novel, yet improbable concept. Not even Wales though could have predicted it would evolve into the world’s leading general reference wo

In the last week alone, more than 10 million people have visited the NHS Choices website. Often viewed as the public go-to place for a wide-range of health information, it is somewhere many of us turn to when feeling under the weather or looking for advice.

Following in the footsteps of eminent scientific figures like Isaac Newton and Ernest Rutherford is no easy feat, yet two months into his five-year presidency at the Royal Society, Sir Venki Ramakrishnan is taking it all in his stride. Smartly dressed and softly spoken, the Nobel laureate and deputy director of the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) is a calm figure of authority, very much at ease with his new role at the world's oldest and most illustrious scientific body. Indian-born Ramakrishnan, 63, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, alongside Tom Steitz and Ada Yonath, is the 62nd president in the society's 355-year history.

Seems an odd question, doesn't it? But then think again, how easily could you define the two? I naively assumed it would be fairly obvious to the UK public what the difference between the two is, but findings this week suggest the misidentification of chemists as pharmacists is a peculiarly British phenomenon.