InTuition

KF - Writer Soil health is the frequently mentioned but never fully explained fourth horseman of the Anthropocene. This period when humans are the overriding force of change over the planet is fuelled by 4 umbrella issues: overexploitation, overpopulation, pollution and soil degradation. Now, the first 3 are widely spoken about: exploiting animals to extinction for food or for sport, plastic in the ocean, urban encroachment, climate change. These issues are all covered by the first 3 headings and so receive far more of the limelight than any others. However, soil degradation often gets cast to the bottom of the pile for the simple reason which is that: too few people understand how vital soil is to everything we do. It’s true. Soil might not be the sexiest subject on a Saturday night but like the kid in the movie who was bullied by the lead in the first act, mistreated soil will later return as the villain to take its revenge. So how do we avoid this tired movie cliché and stop soi...

Eve Lewis - Guest Writer In the early hours of July 10th, 1916, Wyn Griffith stood at a hurriedly erected battalion HQ in the middle of Mametz Wood. He had not eaten for twenty-four hours, and had not slept in even longer. As he attempted to make sense of the chaos around him and form a cohesive battle plan for the handful of men left able to fight, Griffith was told that his younger brother, Watcyn, had been killed whilst running a message. Watcyn was just nineteen when he died and became one of more than four thousand Welshmen ‘mown down like corn’ in the six day attack on Mametz Wood as part of the Somme Offensive. Yet Griffith had no time to grieve; the assault continued around him and he had little choice but to keep moving with it, leading those under his command until fresh troops could relieve them. Finally, on July 12th, the last of the German soldiers were pushed from the woods and Mametz was claimed by the Royal Welch Fusiliers. It was one of the few outright successe...

Daniel Priestley - Writer and Editor In this series of articles I will aim to pick apart and suggest alternatives to the current democratic tools used in the UK’s democracy. The aim is to show how it’s not just our politicians that are broken, but the system that they operate in. Today’s topic is voting systems. The UK currently uses a number of different voting systems for different elections. We will be focusing on the most problematic system which is used for the most important elections: “first past the post” which is used for general elections. The FPTP voting system separates the UK into 650 (soon to be 600) constituencies in which everyone votes for a single candidate (usually a representative of a political party) and whoever gets the most votes within their constituency becomes an MP. Each of these MPs sits in parliament and votes on legislation, and whichever political party can obtain a majority (over 50%) in the House of Commons gets to form the government – with their...

Alison Romaine - Writer Quantum mechanics describes the very smallest things in our universe: molecules, atoms and subatomic particles e.g. electrons, protons and neutrons - the fundamental make-up of our daily lives. It has a ‘strangeness’ (Ghose, 2015) that can make its principles such as ‘superposition’ - where something can be in two places at once - seem so remote from our counterintuitive understanding (based on our ‘real-world’ experience). It is therefore such a departure from the ‘classical’ physics of Newton, that we simply reserve its difficulty for the brainy physicists to handle. However, quantum theory is not just bound to formulae on a blackboard, in fact, it holds up our modern society and proffers solutions to 21st century challenges. Importance of Quantum Mechanics Without the understanding of quantum physics, we would not have computers, LEDs (rely on semiconductors) GPS technology (rely on atomic clocks), MRI machines, encryption and lasers which beam through ...

Sophie Bond- Writer I’m sure you will remember the exhausting difficulty of learning to read and write - nothing ever written the way you thought it would be. But why did the word sound different when produced compared to how you spelt it out in your phonics lessons? It is important to note that English has an alphabetic writing system, meaning that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a sound and a grapheme. A grapheme is the symbol used in writing when spelling out a word, so in the word ‘happy’, the graphemic form is <happy>. Geoffrery Sampson (2013) describes writing as ‘a means of visually recording spoken utterances’. English is comprised of 26 symbols; 21 consonants and 5 vowels, originating from other alphabetic systems such as Roman and Greek. However, English is a language which has an opaque orthography, meaning that there is still phoneme (sound) grapheme (spelling) correspondence, but not in all cases. For example, the phoneme /f/ can be represented by the ...

Edward Baker &  Daniel Priestley  You’ll be vaguely aware of who the Jehovah’s Witnesses are from their notorious door knocking habits to promote their religion. With a worldwide profile and 8.5 million Jehovah’s Witnesses actively preaching every month, the religion is incredibly significant - for scale Judaism is estimated to have about 14 million followers. However what you might not know is that their practices are banned in 34 different countries; in alphabetical order these countries are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Brunei, China, Comoros. Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Loas, Lebanon, LIbya, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, U.A.E., Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yeman. This article will focus in on one of these countries: Russia. Whilst practicing the religion in not strictly illegal, the Russian Supreme Court declared the group as “e...

Niamh Brook - Writer Spiderman into the Spider-Verse is unlike any animation I have seen before but I almost missed my opportunity to see it on the big screen. When asking my friends if they would see it with me they would all respond the same “isn’t it a kid’s film?” And to be honest. Yes. It is a kids film. But it is so much more than that. The film tells the story of Miles Morales. An African, Hispanic teen living in Brooklyn with his mum and dad. After an evening spray painting with his uncle, he is bitten by a radioactive spider and (you guessed it) receives spider powers. As the story progresses he and the spider people from different parallel universes join together to stop a particle accelerator from ending everything. The film deals with themes of self -acceptance, family and responsibility and wonderfully puts across these themes with great heart and humour. However, it is not just the beautiful storytelling that makes Spiderman into the spider verse so unique, it’s the...