Opinion: There’s no such thing as a natural-born gambler
22 April 2016Anthony Pickles (Division of Social Anthropology) discusses why gambling is a relatively modern invention.
Opinion: The man who taught infinity: how GH Hardy tamed Srinivasa Ramanujan’s genius
22 April 2016Béla Bollobás (Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics) discusses the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan and the influence of his tutor Godfrey Harold Hardy.
UK’s top student hackers compete for cyber security
22 April 2016Students from the UK’s top cyber security universities will compete in Cambridge this weekend, in part to address the country’s looming cyber security skills gap.
Reducing number of infectious malaria parasites in donated blood could help prevent transmission during transfusion
21 April 2016A technique for reducing the number of infectious malaria parasites in whole blood could significantly reduce the number of cases of transmission of malaria through blood transfusion, according to a collaboration between researchers in Cambridge, UK, and Kumasi, Ghana.
Opinion: Genetics: what it is that makes you clever – and why it’s shrouded in controversy
21 April 2016Daphne Martschenko (Faculty of Education) discusses the concept of intelligence and the drive to identify and quantify it.
Æthelred the Unready, King of the English: 1,000 years of bad press
21 April 2016He was just a boy when he became King of the English and his reign was marked by repeated attacks by the Danes. Æthelred, who died 1,000 years ago on 23 April 1016, is remembered as ‘the Unready’. But his nickname masks a more complex picture.
Flexible hours 'controlled by management' cause stress and damage home lives of low-paid workers
20 April 2016Researcher Alex Wood calls on new DWP Minister Stephen Crabb to acknowledge distinction between flexible scheduling controlled by managers to maximise profit, damaging lives of the low-paid in the process, and high-end professionals who set their own schedules – an issue he says was publicly fudged by Ian Duncan-Smith to justify zero-hour contracts.
Baboons watch neighbours for clues about food, but can end up in queues
20 April 2016Baboons learn about food locations socially through monitoring the behaviour of those around them. While proximity to others is the key to acquiring information, research shows that accessing food depends on the complex hierarchies of a baboon troop, and those lower down the pecking order can end up queuing for leftovers.
Monkeys regulate metabolism to cope with environment and rigours of mating season
20 April 2016The flexible physiology of Barbary macaques in responding to extreme environmental conditions of their natural habitat may help shed light on the mechanisms that allowed our ancestors to thrive outside Africa, say researchers. New study also presents the first evidence for male primates boosting their metabolic physiology for mating.
New cases of dementia in the UK fall by 20% over two decades
19 April 2016The UK has seen a 20% fall in the incidence of dementia over the past two decades, according to new research from England, led by the University of Cambridge, leading to an estimated 40,000 fewer cases of dementia than previously predicted. However, the study, published today in Nature Communications, suggests that the dramatic change has been observed mainly in men.
