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Dr Maciej Pawlik (UCL Risk & Disaster Reduction) highlights East London's recent flooding in an article for The Conversation written with a colleague, where they recommend improved flood defences, greater green infrastructure and raised community awareness.

University of Warwick scientists has found that firmer, lower water content hydrogels limit bacterial growth, with implications for designing antibacterial coatings, infection models, and advanced medical materials. Hydrogels are soft, jelly-like materials that can absorb large amounts of water. They are widely used in medical technologies such as contact lenses and wound dressings, and are also a staple of laboratory research, where they are used to grow bacteria.

Trauma patients urgently requiring a breathing tube are more likely to survive if the tube is inserted before arriving at hospital compared to insertion afterwards, suggests a modelling study led by researchers at UCL and the Severn Major Trauma Network. The researchers found that prehospital emergency intubation of high-risk trauma patients could improve 30-day survival by 10.3%, and could save 170 lives each year in the UK.

Lung cancer patients who have never smoked make up a significant and growing share of global lung cancer cases, yet remain an understudied group, according to a new review written by UCL researchers.

Middle-aged women from more deprived backgrounds in Great Britain are significantly more likely to smoke and face greater challenges when trying to quit, according to a new study from researchers at UCL. The study, published in BMC Medicine and funded by Cancer Research UK, analysed women's smoking habits by age and socio-economic status and revealed that for women from less deprived backgrounds, smoking rates were highest in adolescence and early adulthood before declining through middle-age and later life.

AI stethoscope can help spot 'silent epidemic' of heart valve disease earlier than GPs, study suggests Artificial intelligence could help doctors detect serious heart valve disease years earlier, potentially saving thousands of lives, a new study suggests. Researchers led by the University of Cambridge analysed heart sounds from nearly 1,800 patients using an AI algorithm trained to recognise valve disease, a condition that often goes undiagnosed until it becomes life-threatening.

Restrictive policies may bring a small economic benefit to schools and are not linked to better student mental wellbeing Teachers in secondary schools in England are spending significant time policing students' smartphone use, as the average sized school could be committing more than 100 hours each week to manage it according to new research.

Following new research, the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) has introduced guidelines to help veterinarians safely check feeding tube placement in dogs and cats.

Women in the UK who use online banking tools are nearly five times as likely to manage their household finances and about twice as likely to have the final say in major financial decisions, compared with women who don't bank online, a new UCL-led study has found. Using nationally representative data of heterosexual couples aged 20-64 from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study, researchers show how online banking enhances its usersfinancial influence within their relationship, making them more likely to manage the couple-s money and have the final say in major financial decisions.

Researchers from The University of Manchester have contributed to a new global benchmark designed to measure the limits of today's most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

A new research centre based at the University of Glasgow is setting out to develop the 'cognitive' cities of the future which will revolutionise urban life.