Things you might not know

Nottingham’s a city bursting with proud scientific discovery and achievement and there’s so much going on here. Here’s a selection of fascinating facts about science in the city…

• Albert Einstein once paid Nottingham a visit and said that his discoveries wouldn’t have been possible without the work of local physicist and mathematician George Green, 150 years earlier.
   
• Video recorders might be heading the way of the dinosaurs but the first ones for the home in this country were invented here. It was all thanks to Norman Rutherford and Michael Turner of the Nottingham Electric Valve Company. 
   
• 2003 was a great year for The University of Nottingham. Sir Peter Mansfield was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Sir Clive Granger, who spent much of his career at the University, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Science.
   
• In 2007, scientists voted The University of Nottingham the Best Place to Work in Academia in the UK and Europe.
   
• BioCity Nottingham is the UK’s largest bioscience innovation and incubation centre, providing a fantastic place for new companies to start out and grow. There are some very clever things happening there, from drug testing to screening for animal cancers. 
   
• The £2.3 million Nottingham Trent University Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Centre manages a worldwide research project into pioneering new vaccine treatments for cancer patients. It’s one of the major centres of its kind in the UK and covers range of sciences, including cell biology and pathology, immunology, cancer, neuroscience, food microbiology, pharmacology and toxicology and DNA technology.
   
• The University of Nottingham is the birthplace of the MRI scanner. There are now 22,000 used in hospitals throughout the world. Sir Peter Mansfield won the Nobel Prize for his achievements.
   
• Over the next 10 years, Nottingham’s science sector is likely to grow by more than 15% and create nearly 20,000 jobs.
   
• Scientists are currently testing a new kind of super broccoli, which may help to fight cancers of the stomach, lung, prostate and colon. 
   
• The University of Nottingham is one of the leading places in the country fighting MRSA and other hospital infections.
   
• Scientists at The University of Nottingham have invented a machine that can unobtrusively and continuously monitor the heart of an unborn baby. 
   
• In 2005 The University of Nottingham opened the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science; the first vet school to be established in the UK for 50 years.
   
• There are more than 7,000 science students at Nottingham’s two universities.
   
• There are around 62,000 people working in science in Nottingham – that’s one in five jobs.
   
• Nottingham Trent University has a unique environmental chamber that can help top athletes acclimatise to any type of environment – from Egypt to Everest.
   
• Scientists at Nottingham Trent University have invented a way of seeing all the layers of a painting – right down to the initial sketch! This gives valuable insights into the way artists created their works and can help keep masterpieces in top condition.
   
• Did you know Nottingham Trent University has an observatory? It’s capable of capturing impressively sharp images of our solar system. The telescope enables students to see spectacles such as the colour details of Jupiter, the surface channels on Mars and Saturn’s beautiful rings.
   
• One of the world’s most popular and effective painkillers, ibuprofen, was discovered by Nottingham’s Boots company in the early 1960s.