15 Jan 2018

Another chance for the last man hanged in Dundee?

A re-examination of the medical evidence which led to the execution of William Bury, the last man hanged in Dundee 129 years ago, will be staged at a public mock trial next month, organised by the University of Dundee. Bury was found guilty of the murder of his wife Ellen, and hanged on April 24, 1889. In his initial confession he made a claim to be Jack the Ripper. His conviction rested largely on medical evidence which drew some uncertainty from the jury at the time. Now students from the Mooting Societies at the Universities of Dundee and Aberdeen will take part in a re-consideration of the informatio...

12 Jan 2018

2018 Stephen Fry Awards

University of Dundee researchers have been praised by Stephen Fry after their efforts in communicating research to the public won them awards named after the University’s former rector. The Stephen Fry Awards for Excellence in Public Engagement with Research celebrate the sharing of the world-class research carried out at Dundee with the wider public. They are given to the project and researcher that made the greatest contribution to public engagement in the past year. The 2018 Public Engagement Project of the Year was won by Hands of X, a collaboration that designs made-to-order prosthetic hands i...

12 Jan 2018

From Dundee to Disney: A graduate’s magical tale

A University of Dundee graduate, now turned Walt Disney World employee, has become a published academic after her fourth-year Psychology dissertation was printed in a dermatology journal. 23-year-old Taylor Petrie’s article Facial Treatment With Botulinum Toxin Improves Attractiveness Rated by Self and Others, and Psychological Wellbeinghas now been published in Dermatologic Surgery, the official publication of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery. Taylor, who graduated in 2016, had been working on the reception desk at Fresh inc. Medispa in Invergowrie when she began to notice a pattern w...

10 Jan 2018

Funding awarded to improve barley crops

A University of Dundee academic has been awarded more than £600,000 to study an increasing problem with the cereal crop barley that impacts the commercially important malting process and the shelf-life of animal feed. Dr Sarah McKim, a School of Life Sciences researcher based at the James Hutton Institute, was awarded a BBSRC research grant to investigate the unfavourable trait, called ‘skinning’, and to develop tools to track it in breeding populations. Dr McKim said, “Skinning occurs when the barley grain husk does not completely adhere, or ‘stick’, to the barley gra...

10 Jan 2018

Dundee to join CMS Collaboration at CERN

The University of Dundee is to become a partner of the CMS Collaboration at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. The CMS is one of the four main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the CMS Collaboration brings together members of the scientific community from across the globe in a quest to advance humanity’s knowledge of the very basic laws of our universe. The CMS captures and measures data from the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest scientific experiment where recent breakthroughs have included the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, which has hel...