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London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
A new report, written by Professor Sir Andrew Haines director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), has linked the production of meat to climate change.
The report finds that reducing livestock production could lead to major reductions in global CO2 emissions.
Recent UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 percent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds.
As the world’s leaders meet at Copenhagen for Climate Change talks, the report calls for a 30 percent reduction in the number of farm animals bred for meat which will help the UK achieve its target of halving carbon emissions by 2030.
International research
LSHTM has also won £3.5m Leverhulme Trust research grant this week to address the global food security crisis by investigating the links between agriculture and health.
The research will be coordinated by the London International Development Centre, a collaboration between six University of London colleges:
- Birkbeck College
- Institute of Education
- London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
- School of Oriental and African Studies
- Royal Veterinary College
- The School of Pharmacy
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
School children in Africa
According to the UN, more than 60 million children go to school hungry every day worldwide. To help combat the problem, Imperial College London has launched a new project to help local farmers in sub-Saharan Africa provide healthy school meals for local children.
The project will help governments to run school meal programmes using locally-sourced food, providing regular orders and a reliable income for local farmers. The project will also conduct a series of studies to analyse the cost and impact of the school meal programmes.
Supported by a $12 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the project aims to ensure a reliable and fair market for local farmers’ products in countries such as Mali, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi and Kenya.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
University College London
University College London (UCL) has recently announced a partnership with Yale University to improve the human condition through translational medicine.
Translational medicine aims to improve patient treatments using molecular and cellular discoveries. This research focussed approach aims to increase the speed at which discoveries made in the laboratory are turned into remedies that can be used to treat patients.
Initial research will focus on cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurosciences but will also expand into other areas of basic research, including cancer biology, neuroscience and women’s health.
UCL was recently ranked fourth in The Times Higher Education/QS World University Rankings, and Yale ranked third.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
Imperial College London
Researchers at Imperial College London have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and have uncovered where in the Solar System it came from using a new camera network.
Meteorites are the only surviving physical record of the formation of our Solar System. By analysing meteorites, researchers can learn valuable information about the conditions that existed when the Solar System was being formed.
However, information about where individual meteorites originated, and how they were moving around the Solar System prior to falling to Earth, is available for only a dozen of around 1100 documented meteorite falls over the past two hundred years.
The new meteorite, which is about the size of cricket ball, is the first to be retrieved since researchers from Imperial set up their cameras to track meteorites falling in Australia. They hope that their new desert network could yield many more findings.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
Outside the stunning new Dawin Centre
The new Darwin Centre, an inspirational new museum collection that will safeguard 17 million insect and three million plant specimens, has been opened at the Natural History Museum by Prince William.
A new state-of-the-art scientific research facility within the Centre will be used by over 200 scientists at a time. Visitors will be allowed to journey deep into the heart of the eight-storey cocoon.
Once inside, visitors can watch scientists at work in laboratories and question them about their cutting-edge research.
Natural history footage is available to visitors in the high-tech Attenborough Studio and curious visitors can interact with the 12-metre Climate Change Wall which opens up a hidden world at the Natural History Museum.
The Natural History Museum is also a world-leading science research centre and was selected by Time Out magazine as one of the Seven Wonders of London.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
The Queen Mary Bioenterprises Innovation Centre
A new five storey innovation centre offering 3,900 square metres of laboratory space, plus an auditorium and a café has opened at Queen Mary, University of London.
The laboratory design will allow tenants to specify the internal division of their labs and the ratio of wet-lab to write up space.
The Queen Mary Bioenterprises Innovation Centre is designed for start-ups and more mature companies in the biosciences, environmental, nanotech and clean-tech sectors.
The Centre is part of a new medical district in central London and will be located next to both the Barts and the London School of Medicine & Dentistry and the Royal London Hospital.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
London School of Economics and Political Science (image: N.Stead/LSE)
London School of Economics, in association with Deutsche Bank, have announced the establishment of LSE Cities, an international centre for urban excellence starting in January 2010.
With an endowment of £1 million per annum from Deutsche Bank, the Centre will develop new programmes of research, education and outreach focusing on the future of the city. The Centre will bring together academics and policymakers, architects and planners, to discuss the needs of future generations of urban residents.
With an estimated 75 percent of the world’s population living in cities by 2050, our understanding of the environmental and social impact of urban settlements has never been so important.
Alongside climate change, food production and water shortages, the future of the planet will be shaped by the way cities are designed and managed, affecting the lives of billions of urban dwellers.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
Roehampton University
Roehampton University has signed a cooperation agreement with the College of Technology at the Vietnam National University to develop a joint Master’s degree in information management.
The degree is the first in a number of Master’s degrees that the institutions will develop together, with a business Master’s next on the agenda.
This is the second South East Asia partnership for Roehampton, who recently established a relationship with the Royal University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia to run a joint MSc in Psychology, helping to address Cambodia’s shortage of psychology practitioners.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
University College London
University College London (UCL) has announced that it will be placing all its research online and giving free access to anyone who wants to use it.
Open Access is a new form of dissemination for published books, articles, conference proceedings and digital material. Its principles are based on the Berlin Declaration, which urges authors to retain the rights in the materials they produce and to place a copy in an Open Access medium – in UCL’s case the university’s online database – so that they are freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.
This move places UCL at the forefront of academic institutions that are pioneering the move to Open Access and has already given all of its PhD students the option of making their theses available online. The database will be launched in the coming months allowing the university to showcase its research to a global audience.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
Microsoft recently opened its ‘Search Technology Centre’ in London to design and develop search products for the internet. The Centre specialises in the user experience, such as working out improvements to layout and displaying results.
The London centre is Microsoft’s largest European search centre and Jordi Ribas, General Manager at the Centre pointed to London’s wealth of skilled graduates as a key reason for locating in the city.
“A key factor was the availability of top talent” Jordi said. “It’s critical for an organisation like ours to be able to tap into the best talent and some of Europe’s leading universities are here in London. We focus on people that have masters or PhD degrees in machine learning or similar technologies and there are excellent colleges in London.”
Jordi also sees significant growth in their operations in the coming years, in both internet businesses in general and in particular with search. With thousands of IT graduates to choose from, Microsoft has made the right choice.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
“London is a city where different cultures and thoughts meet. Living in this city, I never feel bored.
