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The decline in working-class MPs and rise of career politicians shifted the Labour Party towards a more right wing policy stance on welfare, according to a new study by UCL. The research, published in Comparative Political Studies , examined the policy preferences of working-class and career politicians within the Labour Party both pre and during Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party.

More than half (58%) of employees in Britain can identify changes at work which would make them more productive, a research team drawn from UCL Institute of Education (IOE), Cardiff University and Nuffield College, Oxford has found. These findings are published today in the Skills and Employment Survey (2017).

A unique three-year project to bridge the divide between science and philosophy - which embedded early-career philosophers into some of Cambridge's ground-breaking scientific research clusters - is the subject of a new film released today. Academics in the humanities as well as the sciences are beginning to appreciate some of the difficulties arising from the extreme degrees of specialisation - where we are losing the ability to talk to each other.

Researchers have built the single largest dataset of employment laws - spanning more than 100 countries across much of post-war history - to look at how worker rights affect economies over decades.

Virtual exercise games for rehabilitation and a robotic rectum to detect prostate cancer were on display at a special showcase event. The St Mary's Patient Experience Hub is an initiative designed to use medical simulation and tools to improve the experience of patients and families at St Mary's Hospital.

Will automation, AI and robotics mean a jobless future, or will their productivity free us to innovate and explore? Is the impact of new technologies to be feared, or a chance to rethink the structure of our working lives and ensure a fairer future for all? If routine cognitive tasks are taken over by AI, how do professions develop their future experts? Stella Pachidi On googling 'will a robot take my job'' I find myself on a BBC webpage that invites me to discover the likelihood that my work will be automated in the next 20 years.

Action is needed to encourage a wider range of people from underrepresented groups to enter politics, academics say. The team from Cardiff University's Wales Governance Centre and London Metropolitan University studied what motivates and discourages people from considering running for election to the National Assembly.

A new study looking at the picture of lung cancer care in England finds that patients with lung cancer experience significantly better outcomes in terms of life expectancy, avoiding unnecessary hospital admissions and managing the effects of treatment when cared for by specialist lung cancer nurses. The research, entitled Can nurse specialist working practices reduce the burdens of lung cancer? was presented at the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) conference on 21 June 2018.

Standing during meetings could help keep office workers healthy, but new research from King's College London and Brunel University London suggests it's hard to resist keeping our seats when standing up breaks social rules. Office workers make up half the UK working population and spend approximately two-thirds of their working days seated.

Cambridge researchers are part of a cutting-edge project unveiled by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan last week to better understand Londoners' exposure to air pollution and improve air quality in the capital. Addressing air pollution in cities is a vital but complex challenge. Rod Jones As part of the initiative, a network of air quality sensors will be deployed across the capital, measuring pollution levels in tens of thousands of locations.

Just over half of all births following spontaneous onset of labour occur between 1am and 7am with a peak around 4 am, according to a new study involving UCL, City, University of London and the National Childbirth Trust (NCT).

Jochen Menges, an expert in organisational behaviour, thinks that emotions matter profoundly for employee performance and behaviour. His studies bring nuance to our understanding of how employees wish to feel at work. A bit of emotion, a bit of up and down - that's what makes work meaningful Jochen Menges It is important for people to feel happy rather than miserable in their work - research shows that contented employees deliver better results after all.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge are helping to understand the world of work - the good, the bad, the fair and the future. Here, Simon Deakin, Catherine Barnard and Brendan Burchell launch our month-long focus on some of these projects. Researchers do not initiate projects simply to overturn conventional wisdom, but this is often what they end up doing, simply because few of the ideas or practices which are 'taken for granted' in everyday discourse can safely withstand this type of scrutiny.

Dwarf mongooses remember previous cooperative acts by their groupmates and reward them later, according to new work by University of Bristol researchers, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Market trade was once considered the domain of humans but the exchange of goods and services is now widely recognised in other animals.

Improved regulation has deterred a greater amount of financial misconduct in the UK since the global financial crisis, according to new research published today. Researchers at UEA, Bangor University, and the Universities of Warwick and Otago conducted an analysis differentiating between detection and deterrence of financial misconduct during the period 2002-2016.

For women with HER2 positive early-stage breast cancer taking Herceptin for six months could be as effective as 12 months in preventing relapse and death, and can reduce side effects, finds new research. We are confident that this will mark the first steps towards a reduction of Herceptin treatment to six months in many women with HER2-positive breast cancer.

Female academics with young children find it more difficult to access research funding and generate attention for their results than their male counterparts, according to a new study presented at the Royal Economic Society's Annual Conference (28 March 2018). Analysing the careers of 262 male and female scientists at the University of Turin over a ten-year period, the study shows that women receive less funding than their male peers and citation rates, where research is quoted in other academic work, drop for women with young children.

New research into workplace culture has found that employees with higher levels of autonomy in their work reported positive effects on their overall well-being and higher levels of job satisfaction. Researchers at the University of Birmingham, Business School examined changes in reported well-being relative to levels of autonomy using two separate years of data for 20,000 employees from the Understanding Society survey.

Serious asthma attacks in adults can be reduced by a temporary but significant increase in the dose of inhaled steroids during severe episodes of asthma, according to a new UK-wide study led by experts at the University of Nottingham. Previous research at the University has found that doubling the dose of inhaled steroids during worsening asthma did not prevent the frequency of serious attacks, so this new NIHR-funded clinical trial was set up to see if quadrupling the dose had a more beneficial effect.

The proportion of people experiencing heart disease and stroke who have five or more other health conditions quadrupled between 2000 and 2014, and the rise was not driven by age, new research by The George Institute for Global Health at the University of Oxford has found. The study, which could have significant implications for the way healthcare is provided, analysed data on over four million people in the UK.