The presidential election grew heated at CUSU and the GU’s election hustings yesterday, as candidates took the chance to go on the offensive.

Throughout the evening, candidates made speeches and took questions from an audience comprised mainly of regular CUSU Council Attendees, campaign team members, and journalists.

The highlight of the hustings, held in the Mill Lane lecture block, was the CUSU Presidential Debate, in which the gloves finally came off. After a subdued video debate on Sunday, watched by around a dozen viewers, and which was mostly plagued by technical issues, the Presidential candidates entered with a new confidence –[Read full story]

I was a lonely child – but before you get your hankies out, I should explain that this was almost completely by choice. At lunchtime at my first primary school, I used to walk around by myself because I thought playing Mummies and Daddies was so passé. I preferred to make up stories about werewolves and secret castles. I still think of myself sometimes as a tubby seven-year-old, plodding about with my head in the clouds.

Then, one day, I got over the love of my own company and began to make friends. First one, then two, then lots, whom[Read full story]

When February comes to a close, so too does Oscars season. All the films that desperately wanted to get their hands of those golden statues have already been released, leaving us three months of releases that play neither to the Oscars crowd nor the bored school children during their summer holidays. There’s a general assumption that this is dry period for film, where studios release all the films that could be described as ‘curveballs’. However the complete opposite is true: if you look closely, there are some weird, wacky and wonderful films coming out in the next month. Dive in – I dare[Read full story]

Einstein’s theory of relativity is 100 years old this year. It has been placed under scrutiny like no theory before it and passed with flying colours. In the most impressive of these tests, two ultra-high accuracy aluminium ion clocks were installed one foot vertically above the other.

Relativity predicts that the higher clock, experiencing less gravity, will run slightly faster. This tiny difference was experimentally observed and amounted to one part in 1,016, or for every 10,000,000,000,000,000 ticks of one clock the other lost a tock. However, researchers at Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) have shown[Read full story]

“Daddy, are you a communist?” Nicola sits astride the family pony, as her father, Dalton Trumbo (played by Bryan Cranston), offers a careful analogy: if she made the choice to share her packed lunch with another child who had none, she’d be a communist too. This trite reduction – with all the scope of a thought-provoking meme – is the nearest the film comes to any real engagement with the C-word. Trumbo is no history, let alone a radical history, but rather that timeless reaffirmation of the American constitution and the rights of the (white) American (male).

In 1947 the[Read full story]

Thinking of eating disorders conjures images of painful thinness, starvation and going to any lengths to avoid eating.

For many people, including a proportion of health professionals, eating disorders are represented by anorexia nervosa and the profile of a middle-class, young white female. However, people who experience an eating disorder and are diagnosed with anorexia are actually in the minority. Increasingly, sufferers are more likely to be male, diagnoses are seen earlier than ever before and people are maintaining or even developing eating disorders well into later life.

If we make assumptions about the types of people who struggle with[Read full story]

It’s the biggest competition in Lent and Easter term collegiate rowing. Months of ergs, weights, outings, early mornings, late evenings: they all come down to this moment. Eight men or women sit poised, blades buried, waiting to see if all of their hard work has been worth it. The coaches count down; there is silence on the river. Then a single cannon sounds. Every crew takes that first stroke together, racing forward, desperately trying to catch up to the crew in front and ‘bump’ them. Eight oars rise and sink. Eight rowers strain their every muscle. Yet there are not[Read full story]

A play never finished? Death comes to take us all in the end, whether we accept it as Marie does or fight it kicking and screaming to the grave. Georg Büchner’s brilliant 25-page play has been adapted into a thrilling 90-minute student performance, and for one night more, you too can enter this parallel world lovingly created from electrical tape and desk-lamps. An audience of 11 was not justified for such a novel play, but such is Lent term and such was your Friday night.

Woyzeck is the story of a room. A room that bears witness to a dystopian[Read full story]