For International Women’s Day (8 March), the Cambridge Festival (19 March – 4 April) is celebrating some of the remarkable contributions of women across diverse fields. From philosophy and music to AI and cosmology, the festival will highlight the pioneering work of women who have shaped our understanding of the world in profound ways.
Hiranya Peiris holds the Professorship of Astronomy (1909) at Cambridge, the first woman to do so in the 115-year history of this prestigious chair. As a cosmologist, she delves into cosmic mysteries at the edge of our understanding, reaching back to the very first moments of the Universe after the Big Bang, often treading the path of high risk and high reward.
Dr Matthew Bothwell is an astrophysicist, science communicator and author, and the current Public Astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. Part of Matt’s work is to deliver outreach to schools, run stargazing evenings, give public lectures, and write about all things astronomical. He is also a Bye-Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge.
An international team of astrophysicists has imaged a large number of exocomet belts around nearby stars, and the tiny pebbles within them.
The European Space Agency’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.
It’s a key feature of a school nativity play, but what’s the science behind the Star of Bethlehem?
A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbour was once much more like Earth than it is today.
What can exploding stars teach us about how blood flows through an artery? Or swimming bacteria about how the ocean’s layers mix? A collaboration of researchers, including from the University of Cambridge, has reached a milestone toward training artificial intelligence models to find and use transferable knowledge between fields to drive scientific discovery.
A unique collaboration of astronomers and cancer researchers at Cambridge has been awarded more than £5m to establish the Spatial Profiling and Annotation Centre of Excellence (SPACE) to open up access to their groundbreaking cancer mapping technology and establish collaborations with other scientists to enable them to investigate tumours in 3D.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has signed an agreement for the design and construction of ANDES, the ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph.
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