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Nature & Environment
Haymaking is critical to our heritage meadows, but is later really better?
Meadows are not just about wildflowers, they’re also about hay as an agricultural crop. But they don’t make it like they used to. PhD student, Vicky Bowskill, explains how researching seasonal changes in the nutritional content of hay can help conserve the UK's precious species-rich floodplain meadows.
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Science, Maths & Technology
Understanding interstrand crosslink repair in Drosophila
What happens when DNA becomes damaged? One OU PhD student explains how studying interstrand crosslinks in fruit flies has exploited similar human disorders.
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Science, Maths & Technology
Investigating Links Between Pesticides and Mental Health
What are the links between mood disorders and a type of pesticide called Organophosphates? One OU PhD student explains their research...
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Science, Maths & Technology
Planetary Protection: Space Governance and the Search for Life
What is planetary protection? This article explores the policies and legislative action of forwards and backwards contamination.
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Science, Maths & Technology
Diary of a Mars operations day
Dr Susanne P. Schwenzer outlines a day in the life of the operations team for the Mars rover, Curiosity.
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Science, Maths & Technology
What can Earth tell us about Mars?
As NASA’s Perseverance rover gears up for its mission to collect and test rock samples from the Jezero Crater on Mars, Michael Macey talks about his work, what got him started in this area of research and where he hopes it will go with Ann Grand (Lecturer in Astrobiology Education).
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Science, Maths & Technology
Nanotechnology: Good things come in small packages
How does it feel to use something in your everyday life without realising its importance? Lots of people use it. The economy has changed dramatically over the last 20 years because of it. OU PhD student, Konstantina Nadia Tzelepi, discusses nanotechnology, the study of very small things at a nanoscale.
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Science, Maths & Technology
The delivery service to fix your brain
How can we make sure drugs get to where they are needed in the body? Open University PhD student Conor McQuaid explains one way in which scientists can target the delivery of drugs.
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Science, Maths & Technology
From space to laboratory in four days
Here Dr Natalie Starkey catches up with PhD student Ross Findlay about being the first person to make laboratory analyses of the Winchcombe meteorite.
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Science, Maths & Technology
Researching rare disorders: NGLY-1, the first disorder of deglycosylation
What happens when our cells can’t get rid of the waste products they produce? Working on a project inspired by the passion of the rare disease community, Open University PhD student Sarah Needs explains:
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Science, Maths & Technology
Using lanthanides as medical imaging tools
Discover how an element belonging to the 'rare earth metals' is being used in medicine. Here's how lanthanides' magnetic properties are fantastic for medical imaging:
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Science, Maths & Technology
Sugar coating biopharmaceuticals
Many modern therapeutics, such as those used to treat anaemia and breast cancer, are proteins - but the protein doesn't solely determine how the body responds to the drug. Here's an explainer about what the sugars do: