As thousands of students receive the result of their Oxbridge applications this week, one unsuccessful applicant took the news in an unusual way. Claudia Vulliamy, who had applied to Wadham College, Oxford, converted her rejection letter into a piece of abstract art. Miss Vulliamy told the BBC she made the work, which has been retweeted over 50,000 times, because “it’s not often that you get a letter dedicated to you from Oxford. It’s very meaningful, so I thought it would be funny if I made it into something.”

On Monday, Clare College Cellars will host the first Annual General Meeting of the ‘Clare Lettuce Club’. The meeting, which has been advertised on university ticket website Agora, will see students attempt to eat an entire head of lettuce in an hour. Whoever finishes their lettuce the fastest will assume the presidency of the unique society, and assume responsibility for organising the following year’s meeting. The trend for lettuce clubs began last year at the Maine School for Science and Mathematics in the USA, and has now spread to the UK. Speaking to Varsity, inaugural Clare Lettuce Club president David Wesby said, “it’s gonna be littuce fuck.”

A Cambridge professor has made a breakthrough that could one day lead to the construction of wooden skyscrapers. Professor Paul Dupree, of the university’s Biochemistry Department, has discovered how cellulose and xylan, the two most common naturally occurring polymers, bind together in plant walls. It is hoped that Professor Dupree’s research will aid the development of super-strong timber that could supplant the use of steel and concrete in buildings.

Planning permission has been granted for the construction of a sculpture commemorating the first game of association football. The work will be inscribed with the original eleven ‘Cambridge Rules’ drawn up at Trinity College in 1848, and go on display on Parker’s Piece, where the first game of football was played. Of the original rules, which contain a primitive offside rule, only two are no longer in the game.