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Previously believed to be only man-made, a natural example of a functioning gear mechanism has been discovered in a common insect - the plant-hopper Issus - showing that evolution developed interlocking cogs long before we did. Professor Malcolm Burrows talks about finding the bugs that led to the science, and working with artists Elizabeth Hobbs and Emily Tracy and members of the community in

April 2016 saw the first performance of reconstructed 11th-Century ‘lost songs’ that hadn’t been heard in over 1,000 years - a performance made possible by the research of one of our lecturers (http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/first-performance-in-1000-years-lost-songs-from-the-middle-ages-are-brought-back-to-life-0) Two years on, a CD of this repertoire has just been released, and we are

Billions of words, millions of books, 600 years of Curious Objects. Cambridge University Library is celebrating its 600th anniversary with an exhibition of the weird and wonderful objects in its collections. This rather curious object comes from 18th century England and features a splendid rendering of the man who brought us Hamlet, Macbeth …and invented the word puke! Yes, it’s the Bard

Professor Tim Clutton-Brock has been studying the same meerkat groups for over twenty years. He said: "Meerkats are intensely social and all group members engage in bouts of wrestling, chasing and play fighting, though juveniles and adolescents play more than adults. Since they live together in such close proximity and interact many times each day, it is unsurprising that individual meerkats are

According to Pythagoras, ‘consonance’ – a pleasant-sounding combination of notes – is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these ‘integer ratios’ are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music ‘dissonant’,

Why does one of the world's great research libraries have ectoplasm, a spirit trumpet and beard hair posted to Charles Darwin? The answers lie within 'Curious Objects' at Cambridge University Library, which runs until March 2017 and is open free to the public. This Curious Object broadcasts voices from the beyond using the medium of…mediums. Apparently, the ‘Two Worlds’ spirit trumpet would

April 2016 saw the first performance of reconstructed 11th-Century ‘lost songs’ that hadn’t been heard in over 1,000 years - a performance made possible by the research of one of our lecturers (http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/first-performance-in-1000-years-lost-songs-from-the-middle-ages-are-brought-back-to-life-0) Two years on, a CD of this repertoire has just been released, and we are

The Cambridge University Spaceflight Society are loading screams onto a smartphone that will be blasted into outer space later this year. The public are invited to submit their screams, which will be emitted while in orbit at the same time as the phone records - to test if it's possible to capture the sound of screaming in space. Members of the University's Office of External Affairs and

“These Curious Objects are Ganjifa - playing cards and card games from India, Iran and the Arab world, and are thought to date from the early 18th century. Made of tortoiseshell and finely decorated, they must have belonged to someone absolutely minted. Introduced into India by the Mughals, the game of chance played with these cards was popular from the 16th to the 18th century. Play your cards

April 2016 saw the first performance of reconstructed 11th-Century ‘lost songs’ that hadn’t been heard in over 1,000 years - a performance made possible by the research of one of our lecturers (http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/first-performance-in-1000-years-lost-songs-from-the-middle-ages-are-brought-back-to-life-0) Two years on, a CD of this repertoire has just been released, and we are

Howler monkeys are about the size of a small dog, weighing around seven kilos, yet they are among the loudest terrestrial animals on the planet, and can roar at a similar acoustic frequency to tigers. Evolution has given these otherwise lethargic creatures a complex and powerful vocal system. For males, a critical function of the roar is for mating: to attract females and scare off rival males.

By chemically sampling the atmospheres of two dead stars in the Hyades cluster 150 light years away, researchers at Cambridge and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the building blocks for Earth-sized planets formed around the stars while they lived. The study offers insight into what will happen in our solar system when our Sun burns out 5 billion years from now. This animation is an

Read more about the research here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/male-dogs-four-times-more-likely-to-develop-contagious-cancer-on-nose-or-mouth-than-females Animation Credit: Emma Werner Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour (CTVT) is an unusual cancer – it is infectious and can spread between dogs when they come into contact. The living cancer cells physically ‘transplant’ themselves

Despite adolescence being a high-risk time for developing major psychiatric and drug dependence disorders, very little is known about the teenage brain. A novel research project jointly led by scientists from the University of Cambridge and UCL (University College London) aims to shed light on what happens to the brain as young people mature as part of a £5.4 million project funded by the

When you bury family members in a cemetery, you expect them to stay there. Not so 200 years ago, however, when body snatchers prowled the nation's burial grounds looking for subjects. An acute shortage of bodies eligible for dissection by student doctors in the late 17th century drove this cottage industry until the Anatomy Act of 1832, when dead bodies of all the unclaimed poor could legally

One of the earliest Anglo-Saxon Christian burial sites in Britain has been discovered in a village outside Cambridge. The grave of a teenage girl from the mid 7th century AD has an extraordinary combination of two extremely rare finds: a 'bed burial' and an early Christian artefact in the form of a stunning gold and garnet cross. The girl, aged around 16, was buried on an ornamental bed -- a very

This is a beautiful image of human brain cells, which can now be grown from adult skin cells. Cambridge University's Under the Microscope is a collection of videos that show glimpses of the natural and man-made world in stunning close-up. Check out the rest of the series here: http://bit.ly/A6bwCE Yichen Shi: "Brain neural stem cells derived from human skin cells: these stem cells express typical

One of the most important maps of the UK ever made – described as the ‘Magna Carta of geology’ – is to go on permanent public display in Cambridge after being restored to its former glory. - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/the-magna-carta-of-scientific-maps#sthash.cfVPSGJz.dpuf William Smith’s 1815 Geological Map of England and Wales, which measures 8.5ft x 6ft,

A tree the height of 20 London double-decker buses has been discovered in Malaysia by conservation scientists from the University of Cambridge monitoring the impact of human activity on the biodiversity of a pristine rainforest. The Yellow Meranti stands 89.5m tall in an area of forest known as ‘Sabah’s Lost World’ – the Maliau Basin Conservation Area, one of Malaysia’s last few

Dr Amy Milton from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology relates how Requiem for a Dream, Hubert Selby’s bleak portrayal of drug addiction, motivated her to dedicate her academic career to finding treatments for addiction. Here she talks about this favourite book as part of ‘Novel Thoughts’, a series exploring the literary reading habits of eight Cambridge scientists. From illustrated