At a young age I was fortunate enough to stumble on a copy of Jacques Cousteau’s 1953 book “The Silent World”, which piqued my interest in everything underwater. Shortly thereafter, I saw his movie of the same name. I was hooked. At the earliest possible opportunity I learnt to SCUBA dive, becoming a diving instructor when I left school and basing myself in the southern Egyptian Red Sea for 1992 and 1993. I then returned to England to train as a marine biologist at the University of Southampton (1994 - 1998), before relocating to the Netherlands to complete a M.Sc. and Ph.D. under the supervision of Wolfgang Schlager and Jeroen Kenter, graduating in 2004. Thereafter, I crossed the Atlantic as a post-doc supervised by Bernhard Riegl, with whom I still work closely, before being promoted to faculty with the National Coral Reef Institute – Nova southeastern University in 2006. I joined the University of Miami with the rank of Professor in 2016 where I am pursuing the diverse res
Credit: Sandra Nogue
Research has shed new light on the impact of humans on Earth s biodiversity. The findings suggest that the rate of change in an ecosystem s plant-life increases significantly during the years following human settlement, with the most dramatic changes occurring in locations settled in the last 1500 years.
An international research team studied fossilised pollen dating back 5000 years, extracted from sediments on 27 islands. By analysing the fossils they were able to build up an understanding of the composition of each island s vegetation and how it changed from the oldest to the most recent pollen samples.
The study was led by Dr Sandra Nogué, Lecturer in Palaeoenvironmental Science at the University of Southampton, UK and Professor Manuel Steinbauer from the University of Bayreuth, Germany and University of Bergen, Norway. PhD student Dr Alvaro Castilla-Beltrán was also a member of the Southampton team.
India’s deadly second wave is continuing to worsen, with daily new cases consistently exceeding 300,000 and deaths now having surpassed 3,000 a day. Hospitals are running out of intensive care beds and many are critically short of oxygen for treating patients.
Alarmingly, a lack of high-quality real-time data means that we don’t actually have a clear picture of just how bad the situation currently is, writes Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health at the University of Southampton. The proportion of people in India returning a positive result when tested is 18% – nearly double the World Health Organization’s target threshold of 10%. This suggests a large number of positive cases are going unrecorded, meaning the outbreak is actually larger than the numbers suggest.
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A new observational trial has started, evaluating immune responses in patients with lymphoid cancers to COVID-19 vaccines.
The Prospective Observational Study Evaluating COVID-19 Vaccine Immune Responses in Lymphoid Cancer (PROSECO) trial aims to recruit 680 patients who will provide blood samples before and after vaccination so that clinicians can study their B and T cell responses.
Lymphoid cancers or lymphomas, originate from lymphocytes, a type of immune system cell. PROSECO is looking to recruit patient with all types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.
The trial will run from seven sites across the UK – the centres in Southampton, Oxford, Nottingham, Leicester, Portsmouth, Norwich are now open and another is being set up in Newcastle. Patients with lymphoid cancer are being approached by clinicians and invited to attend but patients who live in areas of participating centres are encouraged to approach their clinicians if the