University of Oxford

The mayor-elect's partner in life

2013-05-25 17:28:00

Midway through his election-night victory speech, Eric Garcetti turned toward the cluster of family on the stage behind him and invited his wife to step forward. He thanked her for "making our life work" under the stress of his run for mayor of Los...

J.R.R. Tolkien's 'Fall of Arthur' and the path to Middle-Earth

2013-05-23 12:00:00

The books go ever on and on. Forty years after his death at 81, works by J.R.R. Tolkien continue to appear. The latest, "The Fall of Arthur," lists nine works published during his lifetime ("The Lord of the Rings" trilogy appears as a single title) and 24...

Fourth American fatality by U.S. drones disclosed

2013-05-22 18:53:00

WASHINGTON — As President Obama prepared to deliver a major speech on national security Thursday, his administration acknowledged for the first time that it had killed four U.S. citizens — one more than previously known — in drone...

Wind blasts on Neptune, Uranus may shed light on exoplanet weather

2013-05-16 15:41:00

Inscrutable ice giants Neptune and Uranus have only a thin rind of windy weather over their fluid contents, a team of planetary scientists say. The research published in the journal Nature relies on decades-old data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft -- and...

Geza Vermes dies at 88; scholar wrote about Dead Sea Scrolls

2013-05-15 17:18:00

Geza Vermes was a graduate student in Belgium in the late 1940s when he was captivated by news sweeping the globe about a remarkable discovery in the desert east of Jerusalem. He quickly switched gears, penning his doctoral thesis on the Dead Sea Scrolls,...

Bringing drones out of the shadows

2013-05-13 00:00:00

The use of unmanned aircraft to kill suspected terrorists, a practice that has dramatically escalated during the Obama administration, is receiving fresh and welcome scrutiny in Congress and elsewhere even as the number of drone strikes seems to be on the...

Greuel, Garcetti find different ways to balance kids, campaigns

2013-05-04 19:15:00

One day last year, a 9-year-old named Thomas came home and announced he was running for office. "Are you kidding me?" his father responded. "Don't we have enough elections in this family?" Thomas, the son of Los Angeles City Controller Wendy Greuel, has...

Harvard professor sorry for remark on economist Keynes' sexuality

2013-05-04 17:23:00

Well-known Harvard professor Niall Ferguson apologized Saturday for what he called “stupid and tactless remarks” suggesting sexual orientation influenced the polices of famed economist John Maynard Keynes. On Thursday, Ferguson suggested...

Scientists map dengue, estimate 390 million infections per year

2013-04-08 04:00:00

An international team has released new estimates of the number of dengue infections around the world, mapping out the places where risk of getting the viral illness is great and those where it's low. It estimated there are 390 million dengue...

Future of organs? Synthetic tissue built with 3-D printer

2013-04-04 13:24:00

Scientists have built a 3-D printer that creates material resembling human tissues. The novel substance, a deceptively simple network of water droplets coated in lipids, could one day be used to deliver drugs to the body -- or perhaps even to replace...

Baseball books cover the bases

2013-03-29 12:00:00

George Plimpton knew the score. A generation or so ago, the late Paris Review editor developed what he called the "Small Ball Theory" of sports writing, which posits "a correlation between the standard of writing about a particular sport and the ball it...

Unmaking Europe

2013-03-29 00:00:00

"We have made Italy, now we must make Italians," goes the old saying. Today we have made the euro, and the crisis of the euro is unmaking Europeans. People who felt enthusiastically European 10 years ago are reverting to angry national stereotypes....

by Ted Gioia (Oxford University Press: 528 pp., $39.95) This exquisite book brings both context and passion to the 250-plus songs that make up the jazz canon, blending research, criticism and a musician's understanding to frame an informal history of the form.

2012-12-13 13:48:42

On an overland safari expedition from Nairobi into the Masai Mara and the Serengeti (without roads or power lines), you will see the world as it looked before human beings inhabited it.

2011-12-30 14:55:41

Cambridge's 'Dagger' crew in action during The Xchanging Boat Race Trial Eight's on The River Thames in London , England. The 2012 Xchanging Boat Race between Oxford University and Cambridge University will take place on April 7th 2012.

2011-12-13 00:00:00