OU News

News from The Open University

needle nursing

Liz forgot her fear of needles to pursue her nursing dream

Liz Westwood was inspired to become a nurse because of two important influences – her late mother and her work colleagues. For the last eight years, she has worked as a Healthcare Assistant in a community specialist palliative care team (improving the quality of life for those patients nearing the end of life). Now she […]

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People person Stefan swapped a life in the skies for saving lives

People person Stefan swapped a life in the skies for saving lives

As a self-professed “people person”, Stefan Franks feels at home pursuing a career in adult nursing. Having left school with GCSEs and BTECs in travel, Stefan began his career in the travel industry taking off for a five-year career with a major airline. Now he is working as a healthcare assistant at a surgery in […]

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OU celebrates Charter Day – proud at 49

OU celebrates Charter Day – proud at 49

“I am the proudest woman on the planet – proud of this fantastic institution, proud of our dedicated staff and proud of our extraordinary students.” Acting Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mary Kellett There is a lot to be proud of at The Open University, not least the success of our students – with some of them sharing […]

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Britain's Fat Fight with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall - Hugh and Anna Taylor holding vegetables

Is obesity inevitable?

The numbers of overweight and obese children are rising as they move through primary school.  This echoes the increasing number of obese adults in the UK, which has nearly doubled in the last 25 years. But is obesity inevitable as we grow older? OU academic Dr Joan Simons has worked closely with the BBC to […]

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Five problematic sex messages perpetuated by advice manuals

Five problematic sex messages perpetuated by advice manuals

I can’t recommend reading over 60 sex advice manuals. I spent several months doing this and it results in a particular combination of sadness, anger and frustration that I’d rather never repeat. The reason for my painful few months was my new book, Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture with Rosalind Gill and Laura […]

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Reaching out

Fix broken part-time market in England with flexible learning incentive

The Open University (OU) is calling on the Government to introduce a new “flexible learning incentive” in its submission to the Post-18 Review into education and funding in England. The OU argues that the main cause of the dramatic decline in the number of HE students aged 21 and over in England – especially among […]

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Six ways Sajid Javid can make British migration policy more humane

Six ways Sajid Javid can make British migration policy more humane

Britain’s increasingly brutal regime of “migration control” has come to a head. After almost two years as home secretary, Amber Rudd resigned on April 29, apologising for misleading parliament of deportation targets, amid public revulsion at the treatment of British people who had come from the Caribbean half a century ago. The prime minister, who […]

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Plan to bring back rocks from Mars is our best bet for finding clues of past life

Plan to bring back rocks from Mars is our best bet for finding clues of past life

Sitting with 200 people at the International Mars Sample Return Conference in Berlin recently to discuss the feasibility of bringing samples back from Mars to Earth, I remember the first such conference in Paris ten years ago. Many of the same people were present again, older and possibly wiser, but certainly more grey or bald. […]

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Cancer cells

Why cancer cells go to sleep

Cancer has always been thought of as something that grows rapidly and uncontrollably, but this view may be wrong. New evidence suggests that cancer alternatively uses the “accelerator” and the “brake” in order to survive. If you plot the growth of prostate cancer tumour progression over years, you get a graph that looks something like […]

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Mars

Mars and the ice-filled crater on its surface

An ice-filled Martian crater is visible in the first photographs of Mars transmitted from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). After a year of extremely dangerous aerobraking, the ExoMars TGO began transmitting photographs of the surface from its camera system, known as CaSSIS (Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System). The first photograph taken by the ExoMars TGO […]

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