News...

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Professor Wins Chemistry Award

Professor Jeff Leigh (CPES) was presented this week with the 1999 Royal Society of Chemistry Award in Chemistry and Electrochemistry of Transition Metals. Jeff, a professor of environmental science, was previously Deputy Director of the BBSRC Nitrogen Fixation Laboratory.

The award recognises Jeff's important contribution to understanding the chemistry of nitrogen compounds and their effect on the environment. His research centres on nitrogen requirements in agriculture and ecologically sound alternatives to nitrate fertilisers, coupled with methods of removing nitrates from water.

Jeff's research attempts to model and understand the mechanism of biological nitrogen fixation. If it were possible to copy this mechanism, the use of nitrate fertilisers could be reduced which would benefit the environment and mean a reduction in cost to the grower. Jeff's work is important because it may provide a cheap and efficient method of growing crops based upon natural products.

Robin Lee Poetry Prize Competition

Sarah Wardle, a student in HUMS, was one of the runners-up in this year's poetry competition.

Reading Room Requiem

Suppose a poet had been last to leave
the Reading Room, the final cell to die
in the giant brain that enclosed the eye
of its great domed mind, had been first to receive

the impression of the pews of learning
sitting empty, the god of knowledge gone,
fled through a hole, as in the Pantheon,
shelves raided, books stacked as if for burning,

suppose he'd seen all this and then, turning,
had shrugged and walked out beneath the golden orb
of the British Museum, quite absorbed
in imagination with ideas churning,

detached as Nero declaiming a song
of Troy's destruction as Rome blazed,
men torched monuments, temples were razed,
suppose him cold-hearted as he went along,

but picture him warmed by a current of thought,
pausing trivially to feel the heat
from hot chestnut coals in Great Russell Street,
pleased to find an image he had not sought.

Sarah Wardle

CDE Rural Development Website

A group of MA students on the current Rural Development programme in CDE have just launched the first Rural Development Website. This is an entirely student-led initiative for which the students were awarded a grant from the Teaching and Learning Development Unit.

This is the first such site developed within CDE and the work on it is still evolving. It is hoped that the site will carry on developing long after the current students have graduated and subsequent cohorts will take over and further develop the initiative

The site address is:

http://members.xoom.com/RuralDev/ and further details about the site are available from Jon Rouse by email at sap01@central.susx.ac.uk.

Monitoring the WWW

Students and staff who use the Internet should note how the University's policy on monitoring the WWW is implemented. It is a criminal offence to access paedophilic or bestial material. In accordance with normal University policy on criminal activity, anyone found accessing such material will be reported immediately to the Police and the appropriate disciplinary body. Anyone found accessing material about hacking will also be reported to the appropriate disciplinary body. Users accessing other banned but less objectionable material will be called to a meeting with the appropriate Computing Service staff and warned that any repetition will lead to formal disciplinary action.

The above arrangements have been approved by the Computing Facilities and Services Committee.