United Kingdom
Reporter Intern at Mongabay.com
Former Editor @ Degrees of Change - from campus to COP21, an investigative series following the successful student movement to divest Newcastle University from fossil fuels
Former Science Editor @ The Courier - student newspaper of Newcastle University
Freelance
Last year it was revealed that since 1970 half of all the world's vertebrate wildlife have disappeared. Animals we barely even knew about have retreated into dusty museum collections without even a basic awareness of their lives to help us fill out the tags.
Newcastle University scientists have cracked the secrets to long life. Scientists say they have identified the key to longevity and good health among centenarians and how they pass that gift onto their offspring.
I n 1981 a 19-year old Barack Obama was dragged off a stage on his college campus by fellow students pretending to be white paramilitaries. It was intended as a symbolic gesture to draw attention to the muzzling of black leaders in Apartheid era South Africa, but, the now president admits, it was all a bit embarrassing.
Freshers' week arrives every year with stunning regularity. Penned into the last seven days of September, to those of us returning to Newcastle this week is as familiar as the university itself. But to the uninitiated, freshers' week still unravels like a Pandora's Box of new experiences.
Newcastle students, in partnership with the Green Party, staged a demonstration at Grey's Monument last Saturday to protest against the University's continued investment in fossil fuel companies, and to urge people to support the divestment movement. While most people might only associate February the 14th with Valentine's Day, the date is shared with Global Divestment Day.
T he upbeat, adolescent origins of the Mystery Jets seem cold and distant in their fifth studio album. Despite their grounding in the commercial success of boy-meets-girl, happy-go-lucky indie pop, Curve of the Earth sees the 4-man outfit drifting in more introspective space. 'Telomere' arrives ghostly and very serious.
F ield Music have spent over a decade breathing colour and cleverness into British indie music. As a creative pairing, the Brewis brothers have quietly courted critical acclaim (despite meagre commercial success). They have made a career of stirring funk riffs and art rock twists into a genre that would be scarcely recognisable without their influence.
Bleak warnings of "the new normal" pitter-patter on the front pages of our broadsheets and blame flashes back and forth in the chambers of power, but what is totally absent from the story of this winter's storms is any sign of a reprieve, of hope for any way to abandon this gloomy outlook.
We have been using fossil fuels as our primary source of external energy for thousands of years. Cavemen burned coal as a heat source and its use, along with oil and gas, has been increasingly used to fuel our way of life since the introduction of new technologies in the industrial revolution.
Degrees of Change
By Jack Elliot Marley Winston Churchill isn't a figure often evoked in the fossil fuel divestment movement, so it was strange to hear his 1942 address in the wake of British victory at El Alamein, and feel something like similitude. "This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end.
By Jack Elliot Marley The first suggestion of France's tragic recent past came on the ride in. Far off the motorway were the outer walls of Charles de Gaulle airport, and on the afternoon of December 11th they were lit up in sombre rain-wracked tones of red, white and blue.
By Jack Elliot Marley Most conversations about climate change on Divestment Week happened in the company of drizzle. Perhaps being saturated with stories of sinking islands, refugees and biblical storms can make this abstraction, "climate change" feel like something that affects other places and other people.
By Jack Elliot Marley Divestment Week drew to a close on Friday, leaving the petition calling on Vice Chancellor Chris Brink to divest the university from fossil fuels 600 names heavier. In a parallel of climate change's impacts on the lives of all people, the week brought together a broad swathe of Newcastle's student community who...
Is climate change THE issue? Or is it the sum of all issues? FemSoc opened the Divestment Week debate with a reassessment of climate change as a confluence of sex, race and class injustice. Our perceptions of who stands to suffer the most from climate change are deeply flawed. Polar bears?
Degrees of Change is a series following Fossil Free Newcastle and their campaign to make the university's investments policy reflect the reality of climate change By Jack Elliot Marley There's an old phrase about "taking coal to Newcastle" that says a lot about this city and its past.
What We Didn't Know a Week Ago
Sorry to burst your bubble 1970s, but scientists this week have disproved a 40-year old theory on why our joints "crack" when we pull them. The prevailing theory from the 1940s on this unpleasant-sounding bodily phenomenon was that an air bubble forms in the gaps between joints when they are extended, and its formation makes the cracking noise that we hear.
Mysterious craters have been appearing all over Siberia, with scientists suspecting climate change may be to blame. Last week a 100-foot wide hole suddenly appeared in the earth on the Yamal Peninsula, which appropriately translates to "end of the earth" in English.
Limpet teeth are made of the strongest biological material on Earth engineers have declared, leaving spider silk a distant second. There's a reason you could never prise these stubborn little molluscs from their homes on rocky shores as a kid- a muscular tongue bristling with tiny teeth.
You're not an adult until you turn 25, a new study by psychiatrist Beatriz Luna of the Pittsburgh School of Medicine has revealed. The news, which cites continued desires for sensation-seeking and novelty in the brain leading up to 25, will come as a welcome relief to students in their late teens and early twenties who dread the inexorable march of time.
A "longevity pill" that slows the process of ageing has been developed . Consumers hearing the news might protest that they weren't born yesterday. After all, treatments aimed at slowing the body's inevitable senescence process have been touted throughout history, with little, if any, scientific validity.
Ethology Your dog does love you says science. MRI scans of the brains of very well behaved pooches found that their caudate nucleus was most active when they were exposed to the scents of their favourite humans. The caudate nucleus is an important part of the brain for identifying the origins of affection.
Environment NASA released an animation illustrating the fate of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere .The video, developed using satellite data from May 2005 to June 2007, depicts the gas in bright reds and oranges above large population centres and its transition to cooler greens and blues as it's buffeted and dispersed by weather systems. Most strikingly, the colours fade as spring and summer arrive in each hemisphere and blooming plant life absorbs the excess greenhouse gas.
Conservation The Afghan fanged deer has recovered from the brink of extinction after a 65 year absence from the wild. Quite appropriately, the fanged deer reappeared back in its old haunts on the same week that Halloween fell, to the delight of conservationists and cervine canine enthusiasts everywhere. Why was it appropriate?
Conservation Only six northern white rhinos remain in the world following the death of 34-year-old Suni, one of the last two breeding males. The species is extinct in the wild and Suni's passing therefore marks a significant dimming of the hopes of conservationists to preserve it in captivity.
Maths There are only four types of cities according to maths. A study reached this conclusion after comparing the geometry of the world's cities, suggesting that cities share "fingerprints" in their urban design. Incidentally, Newcastle, with its large blocks and myriad shapes, has more in common with New York than you might initially think.
Wildcats!
For the first time in a long while, the stands at the Whitley Bay ice rink fell silent. Long after midnight on Tuesday, the first ever season of the Newcastle Wildcats Women's team ended with the conclusion of their last game against the Bradford Sabres B team.
The Sheffield Bears were conclusively dispatched by the Wildcat Women on the ice at Whitley Bay Tuesday night. With only the Bradford Sabres left standing in their way, the league is now very much Newcastle's to win. The midnight face-off saw Coach Stu Tomlinson back at the helm and the arrival of new faces Sacha Riley-Smith and net minder Rachael McGuckin.
The Newcastle Wildcats Women's ice hockey team left the Sheffield Bears with sore heads in a victory that further fuelled their title hopes, delivered their fourth consecutive win and saw A team goalie Nick Smith make his debut as interim coach.
The Newcastle Wildcats women emerged victorious from their first away game which saw them maul the Birmingham Lions C team on their own turf. Despite a short bench and the absence of Jessica Ward and their usual captain, Hannah Maurice, the girls pulled off a 10-0 wipe-out under the leadership of Steph Towns, complete with a shut-out for goalie Sarah Jayne Boulton and the first career goal for Victoria "Scuddaz" Scudamore.
The Wildcats women's ice hockey team set the stage for an exciting season ahead with a breath-taking victory over Northumbrian rivals on the first Saturday back after the Christmas break.
They say history is written by the victors, but if the winning team on Tuesday night contributed anything to the history of ice hockey in British universities it will soon fade from memory compared to the bold new chapter that the ladies of the Newcastle Wildcats carved out on the ice at Whitley Bay.