Research - Durham University

Latest research news
- Parents should be allowed to make informed choices over infant bed-sharing, says child sleep expert
  
  Parents should be given more information and be encouraged to make informed choices to minimise the risks of infant bed-sharing, a child sleep expert has said.
- Brain frontal lobes not sole centre of human intelligence
  
  Human intelligence cannot be explained by the size of the brain’s frontal lobes, say researchers.
- Museum find proves exotic ‘big cat’ prowled British countryside a century ago
  
  The rediscovery of a mystery animal in a museum’s underground storeroom proves that a non-native ‘big cat’ prowled the British countryside at the turn of the last century.
- New fracking research led by Durham University finds it is “not significant” in causing earthquakes
  
  A new study of hundreds of thousands of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) operations has found that the process has only caused earth tremors that could be felt on the surface in three cases.

Research is at the core of Durham University. It shapes and inspires the disciplinary structure of our departments, several of which lead the UK - and even the world - in their fields. Research leads the content and development of our teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and creates new cross-disciplinary programmes through our centres and institutes. In partnership with policy-makers, industry, healthcare and education, Durham's cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research shapes local, national and international agendas.

Links to recent research highlights and to the Research Office and other units and schemes that support our research can be found on this page.

Forthcoming research seminars

Who's afraid of higher spin theories?

4th May 2012, 13:00, CM101, Rajesh Gopakumar

A seminar to celibrate the 20th anniversary of the Newton Institute.

Interacting theories of higher spin gauge fields are a very nontrivial generalisation of Einstein gravity. They seem to be consistently defined only in spacetimes with a non-zero cosmological constant where their strucutre is powerfully constrained by the large symmetry. In recent times, these theories (on anti de sitter space) have proved to be very interesting laboratories for non-supersymmetric versions of the AdS/CFT correspondence. I will give an overview of these topics and why they might be of interest even beyond the string theory context.

Sponsored by the Isaac Newton Institute.