A blue plaque to commemorate the life and work of a great interdisciplinary thinker, whose interest was in visual illusion and what these revealed about human perception, will be unveiled tomorrow [Wednesday 10 May]. Bristol Vision Institute (BVI) at the University of Bristol will unveil the plaque to honour Professor Richard Gregory, a leading Bristol academic and psychologist.
Being prepared for a pandemic, like COVID-19, depends on the ability to predict the course of the pandemic and the human behaviour that drives spread in the event of an outbreak. Cell phone metadata that is routinely collected by telecommunications providers can reveal changes of behavior in people who are diagnosed with a flu-like illness, while also protecting their anonymity, a new study has found. The research, led by Emory University and devised by the University of Bristol, is based on data drawn from a 2009 outbreak of H1N1 influenza in Iceland and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
New guidelines have been developed that it is hoped will help to progress research into vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) following a study led by academics at the University of Bristol that brought together the views of over 150 researchers in 27 countries.
Professor Stephen Hallett has been appointed as the Director of the Composites University Technology Centre (UTC), supported by Rolls-Royce, at the University of Bristol.
Armed with insights from more than 10 years of academic field work exploring women’s issues in her birthplace Liberia, University of Bristol academic, Dr Peace Adzo Medie, turned her hand to writing fiction.
New research challenges the guidance that special aerosol precautions are only needed when using oxygen therapies for COVID-19 patients, and raises concerns about safety of staff and patients on hospital wards, if they are not protected from infectious aerosols.
Virtual Reality – or VR - has long been the idea of science fiction but now it is happening and the impact on society is potentially huge. The University of Bristol and the Digital Cultures Research Centre at University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) are sponsoring a special track at this year’s VR World Congress [Tuesday 11 to Thursday 13 April] to encourage debate into what this may mean for everyone.
The discovery of a new mechanism that controls the way nerve cells in the brain communicate with each other to regulate our learning and long-term memory could have major benefits to understanding how the brain works and what goes wrong in neurodegenerative disorders such as epilepsy and dementia. The breakthrough, published in Nature Neuroscience, was made by scientists at the University of Bristol and the University of Central Lancashire. The findings will have far-reaching implications in many aspects of neuroscience and understanding how the brain works.
The origin of flowering plants famously puzzled Charles Darwin, who described their sudden appearance in the fossil record from relatively recent geological times as an “abominable mystery”. This mystery has further deepened with an inexplicable discrepancy between the relatively recent fossil record and a much older time of origin of flowering plants estimated using genome data.
Evidence is emerging that vitamin D – and possibly vitamins K and A – might help combat COVID-19. A new study from the University of Bristol published in the journal of the German Chemical Society Angewandte Chemie has shown how they – and other antiviral drugs – might work. The research indicates that these dietary supplements and compounds could bind to the viral spike protein and so might reduce SARS-CoV-2 infectivity. In contrast, cholesterol may increase infectivity, which could explain why having high cholesterol is considered a risk factor for serious disease.
