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The Top Ten Student Engager Blogs of 2018

By Arendse I Lund, on 14 January 2019

Last year, we wrote on topics as diverse as the okapi and medieval manuscripts. So what topped the most read list?

As we start off the new year perhaps it’s only natural that we look back at the highlights from the past one. In 2018 we hosted talks on the theme of justice through the ages in the UCL Art Museum. We had a talk on what justice in the prehistoric era might have looked like, then an interactive back-and-forth on how the Anglo-Saxons assessed recompense for crimes committed, and ended with a discussion of law enforcement in the age of the Dark Net. Talk about interdisciplinary!

On another note, a whole slew of new Student Engagers joined our team—meet them here! There are now 15 of us in the UCL Museums ready to talk about our research and the connections with the museum holdings. We’ve also been furiously writing blog posts!

This past week on Twitter, we’ve been counting down our most read blogs of 2018. (We maintain that this list says more about you, our readers, than us.) And, drum roll please, our most popular post was…

The one about why wombats have cubic poop!

A baby wombat with its face full of cubed-shaped poop (Image: © Jack Ashby)

Here’s the full list of our Top Ten:

  1. Sinking our teeth into the topic, we asked did Neanderthals eat brains?
  2. The story of how some ancient Egyptian objects secretly fluoresce infrared light.
  3. A gripping tale of handaxes from ancient Egypt.
  4. The relationship between frogs and fertility.
  5. Ancient neuroscience, or how the Egyptians were the first to describe the cerebral cortex.
  6. How ancient Egyptian art lost its colour.
  7. Myths in the Museum: The dugong and the mermaid.
  8. The ancient Egyptians loved cats (so do we)!
  9. The prevalence of incest—and how the pharaohs suffered for it.
  10. But really, why do wombats poop cubes?

Here’s to more excellent research in 2019!