The Open University

Head of OU lab wins prestigious international award for excellence

15 March 2022

The Head of the OU’s Laboratory Facilities, Julia Barkans, has won an international award in ‘Excellence in Lab Leadership’. Lab Manager’s Leadership Excellence Awards serve to recognise individuals who demonstrate exceptional leadership and management skills within their scientific organisations. The Leadership Excellence Awards programme was launched by Lab Manager in 2022. The competition invited industry […]

The OU academic breaking down barriers for visually impaired people in the creative industry

11 March 2022

Inclusivity driven OU academic, Dr Lisa Bowers, has discussed her collaboration MakeActive, an exploration into using touch in creative industries to aid blind or visually impaired people. As part of British Science Week, Dr Bowers and Dr Alastair Barrow, CEO and co-founder of Generic Robotics Ltd. will be presenting their project in an online discussion […]

The original climate crisis – how the little ice age devastated early modern Europe

9 March 2022

By Ariel Hessayon, Reader in Early Modern History, Goldsmiths, University of London and Dan Taylor, Lecturer in Social and Political Thought, The Open University Just as the UK was recovering from storms Eunice and Franklin, scientists of UN’s the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report warning of a future with spiralling […]

OU student launches website to improve understanding and detection of online misogyny towards Black women

8 March 2022

An Open University (OU) PhD student has launched the first-ever research platform to capture the particular intersection of misogyny and racial oppression experienced by Black women online. Joseph Kwarteng, a second-year PhD student in the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMI), has launched Misogynoir Online, a website that invites Black women to share their stories of […]

Computer hacker silhouette of hooded man with binary data and network security terms. Thinkstock

Ukraine: as cyber security risks grow – how can we protect ourselves?

4 March 2022

In an increasingly digital society, both individuals and businesses rely quite heavily on digital technologies. The increasing number of cyber security threats and attacks are potentially devastating both to individuals and businesses. This threat has worsened since the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Here, Dr Chitra Balakrishna, Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security at the […]

Ruby clouds and water behaving strangely – what we found when studying an exoplanet’s dark side

25 February 2022

by Joanna Barstow, The Open University Since astronomers discovered the first planet orbiting a star other than the Sun, we have found many worlds that are very unlike the ones in our own Solar System. A large number of these “exoplanets” are large, gaseous planets roughly the size of Jupiter, orbiting close to their parent […]

The Power of Plants: join The OU and BBC for a virtual Green Planet event

22 February 2022

Join us for a virtual event this Friday (25 February) with the experts behind The Open University (OU) / BBC programme, The Green Planet. The Green Planet first aired on the BBC in January, offering a stunning insight into our world’s flora, presented by the legendary Sir David Attenborough. The event will be shot in […]

‘Metal clouds and rain made of liquid gems’ – new research into exoplanet atmosphere

21 February 2022

A group of astronomers, including Joanna Barstow from The Open University and experts from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), have examined the atmosphere of a ‘hot Jupiter’ exoplanet, discovering how water changes physical state between day and night. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, an international collaboration of scientists led by Thomas Mikal-Evans from […]

Astronomers think they’ve just spotted an “invisible” black hole for the first time

7 February 2022

By Adam McMaster, Research Student at The Open University and Prof of Astrophysics Education Andrew Norton, at The Open University Astronomers famously snapped the first ever direct image of a black hole in 2019, thanks to material glowing in its presence. But many black holes are actually near impossible to detect. Now another team using […]

New space agency funding could make lunar living a reality

7 February 2022

The UK Space Agency (UKSA) has awarded funding to The Open University space academics to develop a ground-breaking new technology that could one day enable us to build on the Moon using lunar soil. The project has been led by Dr Sungwoo Lim and his colleagues Professor Mahesh Anand, Dr Andrew Morse and Dr James […]

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Category: Science, maths, computing and technology