Annette Mitchell, UCL Greek & Latin PhD student

The first Olympic Games are thought to have occurred in 776 BCE. It was held at Olympia in honour of Zeus and was the first in a series of four Panhellenic games.

These Panhellenic games, held in honour of other Gods, also consisted of the Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian Games, and were attended by delegates from the various Greek city-states. The last Olympics occurred in 394 CE in order to supress paganism in favour of Christianity.

The ancient roots of this now modernised global event are often forgotten and Professor Chris Carey of the UCL Greek and Latin Department has organised a series of events – listed on the Roman Society website – in the run up to the London 2012 Olympics to jog our ‘memory’.

These events focus on various aspects relating to the ancient Greek roots of the games. These include ancient ideas regarding anatomical ideals and the ideology of victory, and modern aspects such as the revival of the games in Athens in 1896.

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Professor Saskia Sassen

On 13 June, renowned sociologist Professor Saskia Sassen, who popularised the term ‘global city’, came to London’s Global University to give a talk on some of her current research.

Centring around the idea that in recent history changes to the socio-economic make-up of capitalist nations has brought about changes to the way society values and includes its members, the talk focused on how the dynamics and metrics of exclusion – and expulsion – have altered throughout much of our society, and largely for the worse.

We started by learning the definition of social expulsion, as opposed to exclusion. Imagine, if you will, those people that reside at the edge of a system (not necessarily a geographical edge). Exclusion would be the prevention of people outside of that system entering it. Expulsion, however, is the act of those already within the system being ejected from it, and finding themselves on the other side of the line.

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Visual imagery is a particularly powerful way of getting people to see science in a different way – as a source of beauty – as well as providing important information about the world around us.

The Wellcome Trust knows this perhaps better than anyone. Their annual Wellcome Image Awards celebrate the best images submitted to their archive in the previous year, and, as usual, UCL scientists get a particularly good showing.

Out of a total of 16 winners, four UCL images were presented with awards by the host Fergus Walsh, the BBC’s medical correspondent.

Three of UCL’s winning images were taken by the same team- Annie Cavanagh and David McCarthy from the UCL School of Pharmacy. Two images were of crystals; the first, a false-colour magnification of caffeine crystal, reminiscent of particularly beautiful sticks of rhubarb. (more…)

Sleep illustration by Matteo Farinella

Have you ever wondered what happens the moment you close your eyes and go to sleep? Did people give you this vague understanding of ‘it’s the time when your body gets to rest’?

Well, following Hans Berger’s invention of the Electroencephalogram (EEG) in 1924, we have been able to measures brain activity and we can now see that the brain is actually very active during sleep.

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