In celebration of International Women’s Day (March 8), Cambridge University Press has made a collection of inspirational work written by, or about, leading academics and pioneers such as Marie Curie, Margaret Atwood and Angela Merkel, available to read for free online.

Researchers from the UK and Denmark have developed a new method to predict the physical stability of drug candidates, which could help with the development of new and more effective medicines for patients. The technology has been licensed to Cambridge spin-out company TeraView, who are developing it for use in the pharmaceutical industry in order to make medicines that are more easily released in the body. 

Researchers from the UK & Japan have identified how the brain’s natural painkilling system could be used as a possible alternative to opioids for the effective relief of chronic pain, which affects as many as one in three people at some point in their lives. 

Researchers have shown for the first time how children can inherit a severe – potentially fatal – mitochondrial disease from a healthy mother. The study, led by researchers from the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit at the University of Cambridge, reveals that healthy people harbour mutations in their mitochondrial DNA and explains how cases of severe mitochondrial disease can appear unexpectedly in previously unaffected families.

The Government have announced £5.4 million in funding to launch the Centre for Digital Built Britain at the University of Cambridge, which will help people make better use of cities by championing the digital revolution in the built environment. The Centre is part of a landmark government-led investment in growing the UK’s construction sector.

A group of researchers from the UK and the US have used machine learning techniques to successfully predict earthquakes. Although their work was performed in a laboratory setting, the experiment closely mimics real-life conditions, and the results could be used to predict the timing of a real earthquake. 

Boy or girl? This is one of the first questions all new parents are asked. In a small percentage of cases, the answer isn’t straightforward: the child is intersex. In a highly gendered society, how does the law apply to people whose physiology doesn’t fit the binary categories of male and female? 

Could replicants ever be a reality? In this article from The Conversation, Fumiya Iida (Department of Engineering) discusses what it would take to make a truly life-like robot. 

Despite the value that humans get from nature, it is not included in measurements of poverty and well-being. Cambridge's Judith Schleicher and Bhaskar Vira say it's about time this changed. 

A political leader who seeks to make his nation “great again” and a time when ‘post-truth’ rhetoric appears to support political ambitions. Not Trump’s America, but Rome 2,000 years ago.