They have put forward a new theory about why black holes become so hugely massive – claiming some of them have no ‘table manners’, and tip their ‘food’ directly into their mouths, eating more than one course simultaneously.

Professor Andrew King and PhD student Chris Nixon from the Department of Physics and Astronomy worked with Monash University in Australia to investigate how some black holes grow so fast that they are billions of times heavier than the sun.

The researchers made a computer simulation of two gas discs orbiting a black hole at different angles. After a short time the discs spread and collide, and large amounts of gas fall into the hole. According to their calculations black holes can grow 1,000 times faster when this happens.

• University Press Release
  

John Florance is a familiar face around Leicester and an even more familiar voice as one of BBC Radio Leicester’s longest-serving broadcasters. An authority on (and, more crucially, fan of) classical music, he can often be found introducing concerts at De Montfort Hall or tutoring courses at Embrace Arts. He is also a Warden of Leicester Cathedral and currently serves as Radio Leicester’s Faith Producer.

Sir David Samworth

Sir David Samworth is President and former Chairman of local food manufacturer Samworth Brothers, which employs more than 5,000 people. Among his many contributions to the city has been sponsorship of the Samworth Enterprise Academy, which opened in 2007 and now has over 1,000 pupils from ages four to 16. Sir David has also sponsored academies in Nottingham and Mansfield.

Sir David and John will each receive an Honorary Doctorate of Laws at this year’s summer Degree Ceremonies which will take place over 10-13 July. Other recipients of Honorary Degrees will be named in due course.

The brief for the project was:

If you’re in the vicinity of the School – just off campus at 19 University Road – during the day, feel free to pop in and take a look at the exhibition. It’s free and open to the public and running until 17 June 2012. (The building is open 9.00am-5.00pm Monday to Friday except Bank Holidays. Please note that the University is closed over Easter Thursday-Tuesday.)

Under the headline 'Talented students may lose out on places at top universities', Professor Burgess argues that Government student number controls will penalise higher education institutions which have worked hard to pull their weight on widening participation in HE.

Referring to last year's white paper on HE, he says that in order for the proposals therein to work:

The two-day event was designed to engage deeply with the idea of the museum – what museums are, what they have been and what they have the potential to become in the future – at a time when the nature and purpose of museums is being widely debated.

A total of 65 speakers and delegates congregated on Leicester from Spain, Germany, Estonia, Croatia, Portugal, Belgium, Australia, Canada and America as well as all parts of the UK. Delegates hailed from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds and professional practices with a rich mix of doctoral students, early career researchers, museum practitioners and academics.

Alongside Leicester’s own Professor Richard Sandell and Dr Janet Marstine, the keynote speakers included David Francis from the British Museum, Dr Julian Manley from the University of the West of England’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies and Miranda Stearn from the Courtauld Institute of Art. The event was sponsored by Hanwell Instruments Ltd (part of the IMC Group Ltd) and our Graduate School Researcher Development Fund.

One of the highlights was the creation of an artificial ice cave (see photo) made from brown paper, complete with stalactites, stalagmites and Neolithic cave paintings (and a bat). Lana Bede from Karlovac City Museum and Katarina Ivanišin Kardum  from Dubrovnik Natural History Museum demonstrated how they had used a similar project back in Croatia to teach schoolchildren about the ice age and its effect on the human population.

Museum Utopias was a follow-up to last year’s conference, Curiouser and Curiouser. You can read a full blow-by-blow account on the conference blog.

EASST is an international non-profit organisiation which “aims to promote research, development and applications in the area of systematic and rigorous engineering of software and systems.” The election of a new President took place during the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS).

And it was during this period that comedy flourished like never before, with performances that were bawdy, ribald and satirical. However, without a working knowledge of Medieval Dutch language it is difficult to appreciate these works and what they tell us about the society that created them.

A new book co-edited by Ben Parsons from our School of English sets out to resolve this situation by bringing together the texts of five farces and five comic monologues in both the original Dutch and a modern English translation. Ben has collaborated with Bas Jongenelen, a teacher of Dutch Literature at Fontys Lerarenopleiding in Tilburg, to produce Comic Drama in the Low Countries, c.1450-1560: A Critical Anthology, published this month by Boydell and Brewer.

The source of their material was the rederijkerskamers or ‘chambers of rhetoric’ which were private clubs for urban, middle class professionals. Every town had at least one rederijkerskamer where the rederijkers would entertain each other with comic farces and monologues, and also create comic dramas for the citizens to enjoy at festivals and celebrations. This being the Middle Ages, it should come as no surprise that some of these plays were far from subtle in their humour.

At least 79 such farces are known to survive, with more than a hundred other comic Dutch plays from this period and a large number of monologues, so Ben and Bas had plenty to choose from. Each piece appears twice in the book: the original Dutch text on one page and a new English translation opposite it. The works often had complex rhyming structures which the editors have not attempted to replicate because: “our main concern in translating these pieces has been to make them as accessible and fluent as possible; clarity has been our guiding concern throughout.”

The book, which is available from the University bookshop, also includes an introductory essay and annotations to explain some of the more esoteric references. (You can read the introduction and one of the monologues using this publisher's widget.) The contents of the book range from the sophisticated Farce of the Fisherman, with its sly undermining of audience expectation, to the grim gallows humour of The Farce of the Beggar, and the hearty scatology of the piece below:

'Feast of Fools' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The Oath of Master Pawnbroker

This extract is from a comic monologue written by Jan Colyns for a zottenfeest (Feast of Fools) in Brussels in 1551. It is a lampoon of a coronation oath, recited in front of a newly elected King of Fools, and gives a good idea of what tickled 16th century Dutch funny bones:

Now listen, King, spread your fingers out,
Say this after me, and swear it on this key:
‘This I swear by the piss–pot and by the privy,
And by the seat with the open hole
And as truly as the strainer who sat upon it
Who drank and ate so tremendously much,
Just as it is written in the foul book
That he befouled himself behind and before,
So I shall undermine the aforementioned with all faith
According to my abilities, from top to bottom,
And will help to strengthen and increase it’[…]
Hear now, you subjects, you must also swear fealty
To the King, and help him in his consuming
And always stand by him, night and day.

One of Mendelssohn’s pupils was Carl Reinecke who also studied under Liszt and Schumann. Reinecke is not so well-known as a composer but was an expert pianist who in turn tutored the likes of Grieg, Janáček, Max Bruch and Sir Arthur Sullivan. His Flute Concerto in D Major (op.283) dates from 1908, 26 years after his most famous work, the flute sonata known as Undine. The soloist for this piece is Dana Morgan, an outstanding local flautist who combines performance with a role as a visiting music teacher at Leicester Grammar School.

Although Mendelssohn never wrote a piece for the xylophone, he was actually a big fan of the instrument, which was popularised in the 1830s by a Russian musician named Josef Gusikov. In fact, so taken was the composer by this innovative form of music that on a couple of occasions he acted as Gusikov’s accompanist.

It is therefore appropriate, in an evening of music by Mozart and his student, to have a xylophone piece. Toshiro Mayuzumi was born in Yokohama in 1929 and studied, after the war, in Tokyo and then Paris where he initially became enamoured of European avant-garde music. But from 1957 his tastes reverted towards his homeland and he composed more typically Japanese works including this evening's piece, Concertino for Xylophone and Orchestra, in 1965.

Alongside many orchestral works he composed more than a hundred films scores and a number of radical electronic pieces (Music for Modulated Wave by Proportion of Prime Number, anyone?). Joe Whelan, a local performer at the start of a promising career, is the soloist for the Mayuzumi work.

Finally, it’s back to Felix M and his Symphony No.1 in C Minor (op.11), written in 1924 when the child prodigy Mendelssohn was just 15, and premiered in Leipzig in 1927. Any orchestral work by a teenager is impressive but Mendelssohn’s first symphony is more than just a precocious novelty, which is why it remains part of the repertoire. And one reason for its quality is that it was, astoundingly, the 13th symphony which Felix had composed! The previous dozen, on which he honed his talents under the tutelage of Carl Friedrich Zelter, remained unpublished until 1972 when musicologists started discovering their delights.

The symphony brings to a close the concert which takes place in Fraser Noble Hall on London Road on Saturday 31 March 2012. Eyes down for a full house at 7.30pm. Tickets are £8/£6 on the door or from the Embrace Arts box office. (Please note that the Hebrides Overture replaces the previously announced Stravinsky String Concerto in the programme.)

The University announced its intention to appoint an outreach officer to help create sports opportunities for Oadby and Wigston residents to mark this year's Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Sports and Recreation service is looking for a recent graduate to fill the new Trainee Sport & Physical Activity Development Assistant role which see the successful applicant visiting schools within the Oadby and Wigston local authority area to help support school sports teams, organise competitions and find volunteers to help at events.

Continuing the sports theme, John Williams from our Department of Sociology attempted to answer the question ‘Is there too much money in sport?’ at a conference to celebrate the British hosting of the Olympic Games. He took part in the debate at the French Institute in London where he was joined by several experts and journalists, and argued that argued that despite its obvious strengths, the British game faced some deep-seated, consequential and debilitating problems rooted in failings in the funding and maintenance of the economic infrastructure of the domestic game itself. 

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) also announced that is has awarded the £1 million Decision Support Unit contract to a consortium led by the Universities of Sheffield, York and Leicester for a third consecutive term. The DSU supports the NICE appraisal process for new treatments, and Leicester’s involvement in the Unit comes from the Biostatistics Group in the Department of Health Sciences.

One of two recipients of the Honorary Fellow Award is David H Evans, Emeritus Professor of Medical Physics in our Department of Cardiovascular Sciences. With this award, the AIUM is recognising “his promotion of ultrasound in medicine across the globe” which includes co-authorship of two definitive books: Doppler ultrasound: Physics, Instrumentation and Clinical Applications (1989) and Doppler ultrasound: Physics, Instrumentation and Signal Processing (2000).

Doppler ultrasound is a technique that can be used to detect blood clots. An ultrasound device passing over the skin near a blood vessel detects reflections from blood cells. If the blood vessel is clear, the cells will be moving and a Doppler effect will be present (that is, the reflections will be different depending on whether the cells are moving towards the detector or away, just like an ambulance siren changes pitch as it passes you). Where a vessel is blocked or constricted, the Doppler ultrasound device can detect non-movement of the blood cells. Blood clots, of course, can lead to conditions such as pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis and stroke.

Professor Evans has held numerous responsible positions within the medical ultrasound world including President of the British Medical Ultrasound Society, President of the European Federation of Societies for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology and Honorary Secretary of the World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology.

Mars is too far away from the Sun and therefore too cold. It may have had primitive life once but there is nothing there now unless some microbes have survived, frozen in the ice caps. Venus is too close to the Sun and way too hot. But Earth is like Baby Bear’s porridge: just right.*

Furthermore, the Earth has been ‘just right’ for about 3.8 billion years, through all manner of changes to the land, the oceans, the ice caps, the atmosphere, the biomass of flora and fauna thereon and the warmth provided by the Sun, not to mention the occasional damn great meteorite whacking into the planet and causing mass extinction.

This new book has been written by Dr Jan Zalasiewicz and Dr Mark Williams from our Department of Geology. Jan is a field geologist, palaeontologist, and stratigrapher who specialises in researching fossil ecosystems and environments; his previous critically acclaimed works include The Earth After Us and The Planet in a Pebble. For this volume he has teamed up with Mark, a former British Antarctic Survey scientist who has published dozens of papers on how the climate has changed over geological timescales.

‘Climate change’ is a hot potato today, both scientifically and politically, but to understand how human activity is affecting the climate one must first grasp how the climate has changed since, well, since we first had a climate. And, crucially, the ways in which the climate has, up to now, stayed basically the same, enabling the great diversity of life on Earth to flourish (the occasional meteorite notwithstanding).

Earth climate from 4.56 billion years ago to present. The Earth’s earliest climate state may, perhaps, have been super-warm. Icehouse climates began during the Archaean. Long-term intervals of greenhouse climate were punctuated by glaciations in the early and late Proterozoic that may have been Snowball Earth events. The glaciations of the Phanerozoic were less extensive, never extending to within 30° of the equator.

Jan and Mark’s book is therefore essential reading for anyone with an interest in climate change, and it is eminently readable and accessible to anyone with a lay interest in science. Published by OUP, The Goldilocks Planet has a cover price of £16.99 but is available from the University Bookshop for just £13.99 and if you come along to the Bookshop this Thursday you can get a signed copy.

Jan will be signing the book in the University Bookshop (located within our David Wilson Library) from 5.30pm on Thursday 29 March 2012. Mark, unfortunately, is out of the country on that date.

And once you’re here, why not take in one of three events happening at 6.00pm on Thursday? You have a choice of lectures: the Rattray Lecture Theatre for a talk on our 1960s Engineering Building, or the Ken Edwards Building for a talk on English castles. Or just up the road in St Stephen’s Church our Chaplaincy presents readings and music to celebrate Easter. Something for everyone at the University of Leicester this week.

Also worth noting is that the term ‘Goldilocks Planet’ is set to receive widespread awareness this summer as it is a major plot point of Hollywood’s latest alien invasion epic Battleship. Which can’t hurt sales of the book…

*The scientific flaw in the Three Bears story is that a larger bowl means greater surface area so faster cooling. Therefore the sequence should be: Daddy Bear’s porridge too cold, Baby Bear’s porridge too hot, Mummy Bear’s porridge just right.

On Thursday 29 March, members of our ecumenical team will give short readings on the theme of the seven last words of Christ on the cross (see last year’s Newsblog story for details of what those are). Inbetween each reading, our string quartet will perform a piece of Haydn. And the whole thing takes place in the suitably thoughtful environment of St. Stephen's United Reformed Church on De Montfort Street, starting at 6.00pm.

Before that, the Chaplaincy Gatehouse is hosting an end-of-term ‘open house’ – between midday and 3.00pm on Thursday – for anyone who would like a little pre-Easter hospitality.

5: Tiling the Plane is one of a sequence of videos which form a project called Numberphile. Other numbers deemed worthy of their own video include 17, 6174, √2, 1729, 42 (of course), ¾, 998001 and 163, the last of which features another Leicester mathematician, Alex Clark.

So why is 5 particularly interesting? As Professor Hunton (whose “research interests lie at the interface of Algebraic Topology, Dynamical Systems and Noncommutative Geometry, particularly in the way they interact in the study of Aperiodically Ordered Patterns and Tilings”) explains, it’s because 5 isn’t 3, 4 or 6...

The Fair at the NEC over 15-17 March 2012 also saw our Space Research Centre display a range of instrumentation it is currently building, for missions to investigate some of the fundamental science questions of our Solar System and beyond. 

Interactive elements for each research theme were provided by the Space Research Centre and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science.  These included viewing the surroundings in the near infrared, exploring how x-ray space instrumentation works, investigating the building blocks of our Solar System and learning what a comet is made from.

A PhD student Nishad Karim explores what the world looks like in the near infra red.

As well as this, our Space Research Centre provided some of the content for a  variety of instruments displayed on the UK Space Agency stand, including the Mid InfraRed Instrument designed for the James Webb Space telescope, that will image the first light in our universe following the big bang, the Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer, that will map the composition of Mercury's surface during the joint European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Bepi-Colombo mission, and the Life Marker chip, designed and led by the University of Leicester, that will test for past and present life on the surface of Mars. 

Almost 60,000 visitors attended the event over three days with National Space Academy project scientist, Dr Rebecca Wilson commenting on how exciting it was to showcase the cutting edge research that we do here at the University of Leicester.

In the Rattray Lecture Theatre, our Department of Engineering presents its 14th annual industry lecture, in association with the Engineering Society. Alan Berman of Berman Guedes Stretton Architects and Thomas Pearson from engineering consultancy Arup will speak on 'Leicester's Engineering Building: Architectural Dream - Engineering Nightmare!’

Built in the early 1960s, grade 2* listed and once featured on a postage stamp, our Engineering Building is an iconic piece of Brutalist architecture designed by James Stirling and James Gowan. It may look distinctive, but it is also very difficult and expensive to maintain (as are Stirling’s other buildings from that era). Berman and Pearson are leading the design team working on planned improvements to the building; they will discuss its history, its distinctive nature, its distinctive problems and its future.

If Medieval architecture is more your bag, you may prefer the first in a series of public lectures presented by our Medieval Research Centre. Dr John Goodall is Architectural Editor for Country Life and the author of several detailed castle guidebooks for English Heritage (including the one for Ashby de la Zouch and Kirby Muxloe Castles, just up the road). Last year he published The English Castle 1066-1640, a critically acclaimed history of the topic.

His lecture, simply entitled ‘The English Castle’ will explore why castles were built and why they continue to fascinate people in the 21st century. This lecture takes place in the Ken Edwards Building, Lecture Theatre 3. Don’t go to the Rattray – you won’t find any pictures of castles there on Thursday.

Both lectures are free and open to the public. And if you are one of those people equally fascinated by medieval architecture and 1960s Brutalism, we’re sorry for the clash. You’ll have to toss a coin or something.