News Archive: September 2013

Bangor student wins BAFTA Cymru Award

Bangor University graduate, Osian Williams has won a British Academy Cymru Award. His short film ,“ Can i Emrys (A song for Emrys)”, which he directed during his third year at Bangor University, won the award for the “Short Form” category.

Publication date: 30 September 2013

Ocean Sciences Professors James Scourse & Chris Richardson discuss IPCC on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme

Click here to view the Radio programme

Publication date: 30 September 2013

10 years of success – businesses come together to celebrate GO Wales at Bangor University

Over 50 businesses from across North West Wales came together at Bangor University last week to celebrate the 10th anniversary of business support and employability project, GO Wales . Also attending the event were a number of business support agencies from across the region as well as representatives from Bangor University who have all provided continuous support to the programme during the past decade.

Publication date: 27 September 2013

Second body clock discovered in the speckled sea louse

Separate timing mechanism presents an exciting new perspective on how organisms define biological time The diminutive speckled sea louse ( Eurydice pulchra ) boasts two body clocks, one for night and day and another for the ebb and flow of the tide, according to research published today, Thursday 26 September. Writing in the journal Current Biology , researchers from Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cambridge and Leicester Universities have confirmed the existence for the first time of a distinct and independent circatidal body clock that follows the 12.4 hour cycle of the tide.

Publication date: 27 September 2013

New Director for leading Social Science Research Centre

The Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Method (WISERD) has appointed a new Director. Professor Ian Rees Jones has been appointed as the new Director at WISERD . Based at Cardiff University, he will lead the Institute which has become a major centre for social science research excellence in Wales and beyond.

Publication date: 27 September 2013

Clams reveal secrets of changing marine climate

Marine scientists at Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences are collecting useful information about climate change from an unlikely source – seashells.

Publication date: 26 September 2013

Graduate on BBC Short Story Shortlist

Lisa Blower, a Bangor University PhD graduate, and part- time lecturer at the School of English, is one of the five shortlisted authors for the BBC Short Story award 2013

Publication date: 25 September 2013

Science Park preferred site announced

Menai Science Park has today announced that a 50 acre site at Gaerwen is the preferred location for the new Science Park to serve North West Wales. The site, currently owned by the Isle of Anglesey County Council was one of three sites on the island shortlisted by the Science Park project team.

Publication date: 25 September 2013

Innovative use of therapies help people in the community

When we talk of innovation, we often think of how it applies to technology, but innovation as a phrase has a far wider meaning. People can be innovative in the way they apply their knowledge for wider benefits. The Centre for Mindfulness Research & Practice at Bangor University is a case in point. They have extended the use of mindfulness-based therapies, originally developed for people with depression, for a broad range of people and situations.

Publication date: 25 September 2013

Law student Alex wins first court case BEFORE graduating

A Bangor University student who endured discrimination at work took her former employer to court and won – before even finishing her Law degree.

Publication date: 24 September 2013

Bangor Law School ranked joint 6th in the UK for student satisfaction

Bangor Law School scored a phenomenal 94% for ‘overall satisfaction’ in this year’s National Student Survey, placing us in joint 6 th position amongst UK law schools for student satisfaction.

Publication date: 24 September 2013

Bangor University to lead multi million pound Europe-wide project to study the history of our seas

The history of the European marine environment during the past thousand years is the target of a €3.1 million (£2.6 million) project, funded by the European Union and led by scientists from School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor University. The project, which also involves researchers from Norway, Germany, France, Croatia, Portugal and the Netherlands, will use the shells of very long-lived molluscs as a record of environmental change over the past thousand years. It builds on research originally developed at Bangor by Professor James Scourse and Professor Chris Richardson that led in 2007 to the discovery of the longest-lived animal known to science – a clam from Iceland that had lived for 507 years.

Publication date: 24 September 2013

Law student wins court case BEFORE graduating

A Bangor University student has more to celebrate beyond receiving a first class honours Law degree. Alex Gibson, 36, from Abergwyngregyn was subjected to a harrowing experience that led her to believe that studying for a Law degree was the only way to protect herself from discrimination and harassment in the workplace.

Publication date: 23 September 2013

Duncan Tanner Award 2013

Martin Andrew Hanks 50, from Penmaenmawr, graduated with an MA in History and also received the Duncan Tanner Award for the Best MA Dissertation, Entitled: Can I Help You? The Early Life of Douglas Houghton.

Publication date: 23 September 2013

Young Food Dudes Lead the Way for Healthy Nurseries

An exciting new programme to establish good eating habits in very young children received the top Health Research Award from LARIA (Local Authorities Research Intelligence Association), at an awards ceremony in Manchester University.

Publication date: 17 September 2013

International Recognition of Bangor's Psychology Department

As Bangor Psychology celebrates its 50th Anniversary the stature of the department on the global stage was again underlined by its ranking in the QS World University Ranking Psychology subject table. Bangor Psychology, which has one of the largest student bodies in the UK, has been ranked in the top 100 Psychology departments in the world for the second year running.

Publication date: 17 September 2013

Freshers get directed routes to University

Welcome Week at Bangor University has come around again this year, and, as the University and its Peer Guides prepare to greet its new students, local residents are advised that there may be some traffic delays in and around Bangor over the week-end of 21-22 September. Traffic can be expected to be heavy with around 2,000 students and their parents arriving at the University’s various halls of residence.

Publication date: 17 September 2013

Bangor University’s continuing role at the centre of world Arthurian studies

Bangor University has been the centre of all things Arthurian this week, and indeed has been an important centre for the study of Arthurian Literature for over 50 years.

Publication date: 11 September 2013

Bangor University in World League

A new table of the world’s top universities, places Bangor University 143rd in the world as a destination for international students. It is also in the top 200 universities (183 rd ) as a recruiter of international staff.

Publication date: 10 September 2013

Let’s produce really tasty, outdoor-grown tomatoes in Wales and the UK

One not-for-profit organisation, the Sárvári Research Trust, is working with experts at Bangor University to develop new outdoor-grown tomato crops for horticulturists in the UK. The aim is to develop a commercially viable new strain of hardy tomato that would be resistant to late- blight, the disease or organism that usually spells disaster for any outdoor grown tomato crop. The same organism has caused potato blight that resulted in the Irish potato famine.

Publication date: 10 September 2013

The neuroscience of erogenous zones

Our erogenous zones are a little odd. There are certain areas of our bodies, which if touched gently, create erotic feelings, while other adjacent body parts do not. For example a woman may enjoy having her neck or ear lobe stroked, but not her cheek or forehead. Why is that?

Publication date: 10 September 2013

Micro-gels in Arctic and Antarctic pack ice

Since 2006 Professor Graham Underwood & Dr Shazia Aslam from the University of Essex and Professor David Thomas from Bangor University's School of Ocean Sciences have led several projects (funded by the Natural Environment Research Council) to study the production of micro-gels, and their widespread importance to the frozen realms of the worlds oceans. They teamed up with colleagues from Australia and Canada to collect and analyse ice cores from both the Arctic and Antarctic. Seven years on, and many frozen trips later they are publishing a rather surprising finding – They, and their co-workers found that there is a strong relationship - spanning ice from both the Arctic and Antarctic - between the physical nature of the ice, the amount of microbiology it contains and the concentrations of gels.

Publication date: 10 September 2013

Student project shows it is safe to eat roadside Blackberries

It is the time of year when many people pick fruit such as blackberries from roadsides. However, some fear that roadside soft fruits may contain high levels of heavy metals due to vehicle emissions. A scientific study undertaken by student James Slack, of County Durham, as part of his degree in BSc Conservation & Forest Ecosystems at Bangor University, aimed to determine whether this was true.

Publication date: 9 September 2013

Archive of the Month

Archive of the month: Conwy Castle and Telford’s Conwy Suspension Bridge View of Conwy Castle and Telford’s Conwy Suspension Bridge, late 19th century. The photograph was taken before the Conwy Road Bridge was constructed in 1958 which originally carried the A55 until the Conwy Tunnel was built in 1991. Imagine the traffic jams today if that was the only bridge!

Publication date: 6 September 2013

What are contested languages?

We’ve heard of minority languages, indeed, Welsh is a minority language, but is recognised and supported as such, and there are lists of endangered languages, but there’s another category: contested languages. These are languages which are sufficiently linguistically different from the main language of the country where they are spoken, to be categorised as separate languages, but have not gained official language status, often being classified as dialects. Most contested languages are also endangered languages, and they are as such listed in the UNESCO Atlas of endangered languages, published in 2010.

Publication date: 6 September 2013

Visceral Mind Summer School

The Visceral Mind Summer School, running in the School of Psychology at Bangor University from 2nd to 6th September 2013, attracted over 190 highly qualified applicants for the 40 available places. The summer school, now in its 4th year, has proven popular with ambitious young researchers keen to share in Bangor Psychology’s world leading expertise in the field of cognitive neuroscience.

Publication date: 3 September 2013

Harnessing our Welsh sunshine

In Wales, we receive on average, 1,390 sunshine hours each year, which could potentially be converted to electricity. If we could capture and convert a small fraction of that, we would need no other source of generation to meet all our energy needs. The technology to capture this energy is photovoltaics, which harnesses the sun’s rays and converts the energy into electricity which can then be used locally or fed into the national grid.

Publication date: 2 September 2013

Bio-economy innovation recognised

The BEACON Bio-refining Centre of Excellence, an innovative research centre dedicated to developing industrial products from plants to reduce reliance on fossil-based resources such as coal and gas, has been shortlisted for the European Commission’s RegioStarts Awards 2014.

Publication date: 2 September 2013