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Oxford University Scientific Society
The Oxford University Scientific Society (OUSS) is a student scientific society at the University of Oxford. It was founded in 1882 as the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club. It is one of the oldest undergraduate science societies in the world. It organizes talks on scientific subjects on a weekly basis. Former speakers include Nobel prize laureates (John E. Walker, Peter Mansfield, Peter J. Ratcliffe) and other well-known scientists (Roger Penrose, Richard Dawkins). OUSS also organizes visits to places of scientific interest, which have included tours of the Bodleian Library, Museum of the History of Science, TOAD distillery in Oxford, the Joint European Torus project, and the National Space Centre in Leicester. In April 2012 they held a large-scale debate on gerontology at the Sheldonian Theatre between Aubrey de Grey and Colin Blakemore, chaired by Sir Richard Peto. History Oxford University increased its provision for science in the second half of 19th ce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific Society
A learned society (; also learned academy, scholarly society, or academic association) is an organization that exists to promote an academic discipline, profession, or a group of related disciplines such as the arts and science. Membership may be open to all, may require possession of some qualification, or may be an honour conferred by election. Most learned societies are non-profit organizations, and many are professional associations. Their activities typically include holding regular conferences for the presentation and discussion of new research results and publishing or sponsoring academic journals in their discipline. Some also act as professional bodies, regulating the activities of their members in the public interest or the collective interest of the membership. History Some of the oldest learned societies are the Académie des Jeux floraux (founded 1323), the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana (founded 1488), the Accademia della Crusca (founded 1583), the Accademia de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colin Blakemore
Sir Colin Blakemore, , Hon (1 June 1944 – 27 June 2022) was a British neurobiologist, specialising in vision and the development of the brain. He was Yeung Kin Man Professor of Neuroscience and senior fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study at City University of Hong Kong. He was a distinguished senior fellow in the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a past Chief Executive of the British Medical Research Council (MRC). He was best known to the public as a communicator of science but also as the target of a long-running animal rights campaign. According to ''The Observer'', he was both "one of the most powerful scientists in the UK" and "a hate figure for the animal rights movement".McKie, Robin"Scientist who stood up to terrorism and mob hate faces his toughest test" ''The Observer'', 14 September 2003. Early life and education Blakemore was born in Stratfo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Acland
Sir Henry Wentworth Dyke Acland, 1st Baronet, (23 August 181516 October 1900) was an English physician and educator. Life Henry Acland was born in Killerton, Exeter, the fourth son of Sir Thomas Acland and Lydia Elizabeth Hoare, and educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford. He was elected Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1840, and then studied medicine in London and Edinburgh. Returning to Oxford, he was appointed Lee's reader in anatomy at Christ Church in 1845, was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1847, and in 1851 was appointed Radcliffe librarian and physician to the Radcliffe Infirmary. Seven years later, he became Regius Professor of Medicine, a post which he retained till 1894. He was also a curator of the university galleries and the Bodleian Library. From 1858 to 1887, he represented his university on the General Medical Council, of which he served as president from 1874 to 1887. In 1860 he accompanied the then Prince of Wales as his physician on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lord Kelvin
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, (26 June 182417 December 1907) was a British mathematician, Mathematical physics, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. Professor of Natural Philosophy (Glasgow), Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for 53 years, he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its contemporary form. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1883, was its President of the Royal Society, president 1890–1895, and in 1892 was the first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords. Absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honour. While the existence of a coldest possible temperature (absolute zero) was known prior to his work, Kelvin is known for determining its correct value as approximately −273.15 degrees Celsius or −459.67 degrees Fahrenheit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Ramsay
Sir William Ramsay (; 2 October 1852 – 23 July 1916) was a Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gases and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904 "in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air" along with his collaborator, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics that same year for their discovery of argon. After the two men identified argon, Ramsay investigated other atmospheric gases. His work in isolating argon, helium, neon, krypton, and xenon led to the development of a new section of the periodic table. Early years Ramsay was born at 2 Clifton StreetGlasgow Post Office Directory 1852 in Glasgow on 2 October 1852, the son of civil engineer and surveyor, William C. Ramsay, and his wife, Catherine Robertson. The family lived at 2 Clifton Street in the city centre, a three-storey and basement Georgian townhouse. The family moved to 1 Oakvale Place in the Hillhead district in his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julian Huxley
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association. Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evoluti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Moseley
Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley (; 23 November 1887 – 10 August 1915) was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra. Moseley's law advanced atomic physics, nuclear physics and quantum physics by providing the first experimental evidence in favour of Niels Bohr's theory, aside from the hydrogen atom spectrum which the Bohr theory was designed to reproduce. That theory refined Ernest Rutherford's and Antonius van den Broek's model, which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its (atomic) number in the periodic table. This remains the accepted model today. When World War I broke out in Western Europe, Moseley left his research work at the University of Oxford behind to volunteer for the Royal Engineers of the British Ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick Soddy
Frederick Soddy FRS (2 September 1877 – 22 September 1956) was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements. In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes". Soddy was a polymath who mastered chemistry, nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, finance and economics. Biography Soddy was born at 6 Bolton Road, Eastbourne, England, the son of Benjamin Soddy, corn merchant, and his wife Hannah Green. He went to school at Eastbourne College, before going on to study at University College of Wales at Aberystwyth and at Merton College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1898 with first class honours in chemistry. He was a researcher at Oxford from 189 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nevil Sidgwick
Nevil Vincent Sidgwick FRS (8 May 1873 – 15 March 1952) was an English theoretical chemist who made significant contributions to the theory of valency and chemical bonding. Biography Sidgwick was born in Park Town, Oxford, the elder of two children of William Carr Sidgwick, lecturer at Oriel College, and Sarah Isabella (née Thompson), descended from a notable family; her uncle was Thomas Perronet Thompson. He was initially educated at Summer Fields School but, after a year, he entered Rugby School in 1886. From there he was elected to an open scholarship in Natural Science at Christ Church, Oxford. He gained a first in 1895, and went on to gain another first in Greats in 1897, a very rare feat. His principal interest, though, was science, and he spent some time in Wilhelm Ostwald’s laboratory in Germany, where he fell ill and had to go home. He returned to Germany in the autumn of 1899, this time in Hans von Pechmann’s lab at the University of Tübingen. His researche ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fighting occurring throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific, and parts of Asia. An estimated 9 million soldiers were killed in combat, plus another 23 million wounded, while 5 million civilians died as a result of military action, hunger, and disease. Millions more died in genocides within the Ottoman Empire and in the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was exacerbated by the movement of combatants during the war. Prior to 1914, the European great powers were divided between the Triple Entente (comprising France, Russia, and Britain) and the Triple Alliance (containing Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy). Tensions in the Balkans came to a head on 28 June 1914, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdina ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nature (magazine)
''Nature'' is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, ''Nature'' features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. ''Nature'' was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2019 ''Journal Citation Reports'' (with an ascribed impact factor of 42.778), making it one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals. , it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month. Founded in autumn 1869, ''Nature'' was first circulated by Norman Lockyer and Alexander Macmillan as a public forum for scientific innovations. The mid-20th century facilitated an editorial expansion for the journal; ''Nature'' redoubled its efforts in explan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Halford Mackinder
Sir Halford John Mackinder (15 February 1861 – 6 March 1947) was an English geographer, academic and politician, who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of both geopolitics and geostrategy. He was the first Principal of University Extension College, Reading (which became the University of Reading) from 1892 to 1903, and Director of the London School of Economics from 1903 to 1908. While continuing his academic career part-time, he was also the Member of Parliament for Glasgow Camlachie from 1910 to 1922. From 1923, he was Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics. Early life and education Mackinder was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, England, the son of a doctor, and educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School in Gainsborough, Epsom College and Christ Church, Oxford. At Oxford he started studying natural sciences, specialising in zoology under Henry Nottidge Moseley, who had been the naturalist on the ''Challenger'' expedition. When he turned to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
