The University of Southampton is a public research university located in Southampton, United Kingdom and is a founding member of the Russell Group. It is a member of the European University Association, the Association of Commonwealth Universities and is an accredited institution of the Worldwide Universities Network. Southampton is systematically ranked in the top 15 of British universities and in the best 100 universities in the world. Besides being recognised as one of the leading research universities in the UK, Southampton has also achieved consistently high scores for its teaching and learning activities. It additionally has one of the highest proportions of income derived from research activities in Britain.
Shortly after Pakistan’s May 2013 elections returned Nawaz Sharif to power, I published an article asking whether, having been twice removed from the office of prime minister with less than half his term…
Crowdsourcing competitions, popular with companies seeking to tap into groups of knowledge, are often diminished by malicious behaviour, according to a new study. The research, published today in the Journal…
In the second quarter of this year Japan recorded its largest GDP contraction since the earthquake and tsunami hit in 2011. This time, the single most important reason for the downturn is technical: demand…
Just over ten years ago the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen coined the term “Anthropocene” for a globe totally transformed and dominated by humans, a state he suggested we were in…
A Level results are in and as teenagers pore over their grades, a record number will be able to take up places at university. The results – which show a small decline in the overall pass rate for the first…
The first lessons teaching the new linear A Level, designed specifically with the preparation of students for degree-level education in mind, will be taught in schools and colleges from September 2015…
The Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 is one of the most horrendous atrocities of post-war European history. The mass killing of 7,000 to 8,000 Bosnian Muslims accompanied by the deportation of 25,000 to…
Spectacular transitional fossils, many from northern China, provide overwhelming evidence that dinosaurs evolved into birds and thus didn’t all perish when the deadly meteorite struck at the end of the…
Walt Disney is, to many people, the most influential person who has been in film. And after all, he garnered the most accolades, receiving as many as 59 Oscar nominations. But there’s another film titan…
Next time you have a bad day at work, consider Sisyphus. His annual appraisal by the ancient Greek gods was so bad (over the previous 12 months he demonstrated deceitfulness, greed, malice and homicide…
Unpredictability is omnipresent in life, from dealing playing cards, through contracting an illness or getting promoted, to the rise or fall of equity markets. For those attempting to make the calls on…
The recall of hired home-birthing pools after a baby contracted Legionnaires’ disease will inevitably lead some women to worry about having a water birth at home. While the incidence is rare, it is worth…
Last week there was a bit of a hullabaloo when it was discovered that the international programme director for Greenpeace, Pascal Husting, was flying to work from Luxembourg to Amsterdam a few times a…
A rich western businessman sips champagne as he cruises at 35,000ft and looks down at an archipelago below populated with subsistence fishers. In a few years these coastal communities will be washed away…
What do Easter Island, the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, Serengeti National Park and the Tasmanian Wilderness have in common? They are all UNESCO World Heritage Sites. In order to be listed, a…
A fifth of UK workers are employed in the public sector. Though public sector work is obvious crucial – schools, hospitals, police and so on – measuring performance can be a challenge as output is not…
In Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, the fictional character Whisky Sisodia comments that the “trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo…
A little while ago I had managed to grab a half hour cuppa with a previous vice chairman of the IPCC. Topics of discussion roamed far and wide but with an understandable focus on climate change. As I sat…
There is currently something of a Kenneth Clark renaissance, with an exhibition devoted to him just opened at Tate Britain, and a new Civilisation planned by the BBC. If there is anything to be gained…
Last year Japanese scientists announced they had for the first time extracted gas from offshore deposits of methane hydrate, an ice-like substance made of natural gas (methane) trapped inside water crystals…