GoKawiil
Tech News
Researchers led by Cambridge astronomer Richard Anslow modeled comet impacts and found that the heat and force of atmospheric entry would destroy organic molecules before they could reach Earth's surface, with survivors vaporized on impact. The findings, published in Scientific Reports, challenge the long-held theory that comets seeded early Earth with the chemical precursors of life.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge, working with spin-out GlitterinTech, have built a low-cost optical spectrometer only centimeters in size. Called a convolutional spectrometer, it uses the convolution theorem to analyze light, which the team says yields accuracy and measurement range exceeding existing compact spectrometer designs.
Tolullah Oni, a public-health researcher at the University of Cambridge who calls herself an urban epidemiologist, treats cities as patients by tracking factors like air quality and heat that affect residents' health. In 2019 she founded the non-profit UrbanBetter, which trains local citizens and researchers to collect and analyze their own urban data. The group's civic arm, Cityzens Hubs, now operates in 11 African cities plus Bogotá and Bangkok, alongside a research centre in Cambridge.
Researchers led by the University of Cambridge propose that the evolution of microbes producing collagen-eating enzymes, called collagenases, explains why detailed soft-bodied fossils are common from the late Ediacaran Period but rare afterward. Collagen gives structure to animal tissue, and once these microbes evolved, they could rapidly break down dead organisms' tissue before it had a chance to fossilise. The findings were published in the journal Current Biology.
A researcher at Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy reported a senior colleague's mistreatment of a female administrator in 2021, but instead faced an internal investigation and accusations against himself. After a five-year legal battle, an employment tribunal ruled in August that he had been retaliated against for raising a matter of public interest, and the university has accepted the judgment and pledged to review its procedures.
Graham Farmelo's book 'Hawking: His Life and Work' (John Murray, 2026) chronicles the physicist's scientific achievements alongside his personal struggles, including his motor neuron disease diagnosis, two marriages ending, and his relationships with students and colleagues. The review, written by a physicist who was a close friend of Hawking's from 1996 while working together at the University of Cambridge, praises the book's research and readability.
In 1959, novelist and scientist C.P. Snow delivered Cambridge's Rede Lecture arguing that science and the humanities had split into mutually uncomprehending intellectual camps, a phrase that entered popular language as 'the two cultures.' Three years later, literary critic F.R. Leavis attacked Snow's argument as shallow and even called him a 'preposterous and menacing absurdity,' sparking one of the era's most heated intellectual feuds.