In 1962, Martin Glaessner (1906 – 1989) a geologist and palaeontologist from the University of Adelaide published a paper in Biological Reviews (Biol. Rev. (1962), 37, pp. 467-494 on Pre-Cambrian Fossils, a period of the fossils record we now call the The Ediacaran period, that spans 96 million years from the end of the Cryogenian Period 635 million years ago, to the beginning of the Cambrian period 538.8.
The name 'Ediacaran' takes its name from the Ediacara Hills, in the northern part of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia where geologist Reg Sprigg first discovered undocumented soft-bodied animal fossils in 1946. It wasn't until March 2004 that the name 'Ediacaran' was ratified by the International Commission on Stratigraphy.
Palaeontologists Dr Emily Mitchell from the Department of Zoology, along with Professor Simon Conway Morris and Dr Alex Liu, both from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge discuss their research into the Ediacaran and Cambrian Periods, the techniques used to collect fossil data in the field and the influence Glaessner's work had on the understanding of this new geological period.
A copy of Biological Reviews (Biol. Rev. (1962), 37, pp. 467-494 in which Martin Glaessner's paper Pre-Cambrian Fossils was published.
The original printing plates from our archive, which were used to print the illustrations for Martin Glaessner's Pre-Cambrian Fossils paper.
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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
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