Felix

The Student Voice of Imperial College London
Keep the cat free since 1949
Felix Editor: Sam Lovatt
(9)

25/05/2024

Students at Imperial College London followed peers at universities in the UK and the US on Thursday afternoon, setting up an encampment after a meeting with the university failed to yield commitments to divest from companies ‘supporting the occupation of Palestine’.

Over 100 people – students from Imperial and a small number of outsiders from the general public and other London universities – gathered for an initial rally that organisers say organically turned into an encampment. Four hours later, a core group of around 25 people remained on the lawn outside the tents.

Read more about the encampment and Imperial's response in this week's issue of Felix, out now on campus and online via the link in our bio. 🔗

📷: Walt Gao for Felix

22/03/2024

Over 40% of voters opted for candidates with no manifesto promises in the elections to vote for Imperial College Union’s next President.

Incumbent Union President Camille Boutrolle won re-election, but was trailed closely by Cedric P**n, who emerged as the dark horse of the race with a campaign that capitalised on disaffection with the university.

‘I’m not here to promise you a better future, or any future at all,’ he declared. ‘I’m by no means competent. I’m here purely out of spite.’

He took aim at overseas tuition fees, Imperial’s muted response to criticism of its new logo, and previous Union Presidents whom he accused of being ‘personality-less NPC[s]’ and ‘kissing Imperial’s cake’.

Read the full article on our website, link in bio.

19/03/2024

Union Council will vote next Tuesday on a motion calling for Imperial to seek more feedback on its new logo before proceeding any further with its rollout.

The motion argues that Imperial’s efforts to solicit feedback on its logo ‘were not effectively [or] sufficiently advertised,’ and that ‘without pushback from the Union,’ the university is ‘unlikely’ to solicit or apply any new feedback.

If voted through, next week’s motion will mandate Union President Camille Boutrolle to lobby Imperial’s brand team to ‘openly address the criticism of the new logo’ and ‘improve engagement and feedback collection methods’.

Read more in Issue 1846 out now on campus and online.

📸Rolando Charles

18/03/2024

With cockroaches reported in Union dishwashers and mice spotted in Library Café, pests are regular visitors to Imperial’s South Kensington Campus, according to students and staff at the College. 🐁

Videos show mice scurrying around Library Café at night time, and Felix has received reports of similar sightings in Kokoro, the popular Korean-Japanese food outlet on Level 0 of the Sherfield Building. Last Saturday, staff reported seeing two dead cockroaches in a dishwasher at Metric, the nightclub run by Imperial College Union.

Imperial did not respond to requests for comment, but Felix understands that the Estates team is aware of and working to resolve the ongoing pest problems.

Read the full story and more in Issue 1846 out now on campus and online via the link in our bio 🔗

📸Illustration by Nico Torán for Felix

14/03/2024

1995 Nobel Prize winner Professor Didier Queloz delivered a talk at Imperial last month, sharing recent advances in research into planet formation and the origin and prevalence of life in our universe.

Alongside his supervisor Michel Mayor, Queloz received the Nobel Prize ‘for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star’. Deep in the Milky Way, they found the planet: '51 Pegasi b', in the Pegasus constellation.

Read the full article and more in this week’s issue of Felix, out now on campus and online.

📸Claudia De Rham

11/03/2024

The college unveiled its new strategy on Tuesday, with an address from Hugh Brady in the early afternoon following a glitzy evening launch event at the Science Museum.

The College has taken a three-pronged approach, in which it says it will ‘enable talent’, ‘power research’ and ‘amplify impact’.

Read the full article in Issue 1845 out now on campus and online 🗞️

📸 Walt Gao

07/03/2024

The new logo has been the source of a lot of debate recently amongst the Imperial community. We thought we’d share some of the reasons people gave for signing the ‘Stop the new Imperial logo’ Change.org petition.

Do you agree or disagree with these thoughts? Let us know below ⬇️

05/03/2024

Dr Nael Qtati, the Palestinian Imperial alumnus who was forced to evacuate to southern Gaza in October, fled to Egypt in December last year with his heavily pregnant wife, and is now appealing for help to evacuate the remainder of his family, which includes 18 children.

If you’d like to support Qtati's family, you can donate to his GoFundMe via the link in our bio. Before doing so, please read GoFundMe’s terms of service.

04/03/2024

Imperial struggled to contain the fallout from its decision to change the university logo, as students demanded a referendum and overwhelmed the College’s social media pages with a barrage of criticism.

The university deleted its first Instagram post unveiling the new logo just a day after uploading it. A comment under the post reading ‘use me as the dislike button’ had racked up over 700 dislikes in the hours before deletion.

Read the full coverage on the new Imperial logo in Issue 1844, out now on campus and online via the link in our bio.

29/02/2024

On 11th February, Imperial College London Rocketry team (ICLR) successfully tested their rocket engine THANOS-R on the Silwood Park campus testing facility. This was their most powerful test yet, with the rocket attaining a peak thrust of 3.8kN for two seconds.

THANOS-R is a 3D-printed, regeneratively-cooled liquid rocket engine, which makes it reusable without the need to replace any of its engine components. The test marked one of the first collegiate firings worldwide of an engine 3D printed using a lightweight aluminium alloy, AlSi10Mg.

Read the full article and more in Issue 1843 out now on campus and online. 🗞️

📷: ICLR

27/02/2024

Last week Imperial became the first team this year to qualify for the semi-finals of University Challenge, after securing their second quarter-final victory. Lee, Jones, Haddad, and Debnath pulled away from Manchester after an early scare, beating Manchester 205-120.

📷 BBC

26/02/2024

Imperial has found itself in the spotlight after more than 3000 people signed a petition calling on the university to replace its new logo, unveiled around campus this week.

The petition, which was created on Sunday 18th of February, says that ‘many (if not most) students dislike the new logo; the new colour and font look almost cartoonish and it is not a good representation of the College’.

Its creator set an initial goal of 350 signatures – to match the number of responses Imperial received in its own surveys on the new branding – but surpassed that target at noon on Monday 19th. Imperial was “absolutely determined to develop a brand identity that serves the whole community,” said the brand project spokesperson.

To hear what Hugh Brady, President of Imperial College London, had to say about the rebrand, check out Issue 1834 out now on campus and online.

📷 First slide: Walt Gao for Felix, second slide: Imperial College London

12/02/2024

The share of degrees awarded the top grade at Imperial has soared over the past decade, with nearly three in five undergraduate students receiving a First-Class Honours in 2021/22

Imperial awards the greatest proportion of First-Class degrees of any higher education institution in the country, exceeding the average for the Russell Group, a consortium of top UK universities, by 20 percentage points.

Read the full article in Issue 1842, out now on campus or online via the link in our bio 🗞️

08/02/2024

EU applications to Imperial’s undergraduate programmes have fallen by a third since 2020, following a 300% post-Brexit tuition fee rise. 📈📈

In the past, EU nationals paid the same fees as Home students. But under post-Brexit reforms, those who started courses in 2021/22 or later have been charged at significantly higher overseas student rates.

An EU student who started at Imperial in 2021 will pay four times as much as an equivalent student who started a year earlier.

Read the full article in Issue 1841, out now on campus and online via the link in our bio 🗞️

06/02/2024

Felix’s Photograph of the Week competition has had some beautiful submissions in the past few weeks. 📸✨

Want to see your work featured here? We announce the next theme each week on our stories, so watch this space for your chance to enter and be featured in the paper and on our Instagram!

Check out the link in our bio to enter this week’s theme!

05/02/2024

Science broadcaster Brian Cox was joined by physicists from around the world at Imperial last Monday, to celebrate the life and work of Abdus Salam, the deceased Pakistani Nobel Laureate and Imperial College professor.

Speaking to a packed auditorium at Imperial’s Great Hall and thousands of online viewers, Cox delivered a keynote speech on the theme of unification in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

To accompany Cox’s lecture, the College’s Queen’s Tower Rooms hosted an exhibition showcasing artefacts from Salam’s life. His Nobel Prize medal was on display together with letters of correspondence from Paul Dirac – who was Salam’s PhD supervisor – and other notable physicists.

Read more about Imperial’s recent celebrations of Abdus Salam in Issue 1841 out now on campus or available via the link in our bio. 🔗

📷: Taylor Pomfret (first image), Neha Yasin (second image)

01/02/2024

Princess Anne, sister of King Charles III, visited Imperial last week to open a new MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) building on the College’s Hammersmith Campus.

The £120m building will host the LMS’s biomedical facilities and house 400 scientists working on genetics, heart and metabolic diseases, and sex-based differences in disease. It is located opposite the Hammersmith Hospital, and has been funded by the UKRI Medical Research Council with ‘significant investment’ from Imperial.

Find the full article and more in Issue 1840, out now on campus and online via the link in our bio 📰

30/01/2024

Imperial recorded its third successive victory on University Challenge this
week. In the first real test of their mettle, Haddad, Jones, Lee and Debnath beat Sheffield 195-160.

They will proceed to the semi-finals of the competition if they win their next match.

📸 BBC

29/01/2024

For over three months, Life Sciences researchers in the Sir Ernst Chain Building have consistently endured indoor temperatures below 13°C, forcing them to wear winter jackets under their lab coats, and rendering their experimental results unusable. 🥶

The researchers have lambasted Imperial for breaching UK Government guidelines and its own protocol on workplace temperatures.

Senior College staff have responded by blaming external contractors and ‘technical difficulties’, and telling a distressed building user to take ‘regular breaks’ away from their workplace to ‘warm up’.

To read the full article, find Issue 1840 out now on campus or online via the link in our bio 🗞️

25/01/2024

Imperial President Hugh Brady earns markedly less than his predecessor Alice Gast – but still over nine times as much as the median employee, according to Imperial’s latest annual report.

Brady saw his total remuneration rise to £476,000 last academic year, an increase of
one-fifth on what he earned in 2021/22, when he was Bristol University’s Vice-Chancellor.💸💸

Read the full story in issue 1839, out now on campus and online via the link in our bio 🔗

📸: Imperial College London

23/01/2024

Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest full-backs of all time, rugby legend and alumnus of St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, John Peter Rhys Williams died two weeks ago at the age of 74.

He represented Wales during its golden era of rugby in the 1970s and is one of only six Welsh players to have won three Grand Slams. In 1977, he was awarded the MBE for services to rugby. Williams studied Medicine at St Mary’s and qualified as a physician in 1973.

He pursued his career in medicine, and in 1986, was appointed a consultant in trauma and orthopaedic surgery at the Princess of Wales Hospital, in Mid Glamorgan.

‘I spent half my life breaking bones on the rugby field, then the other half putting them back together in the operating theatre,’ he wrote in his autobiography.

Read the full article in Issue 1839 out now on campus or available online via the link in our bio 🗞️

📸: Ian Gillet for Imperial College London

22/01/2024

Did you feel the cold on campus this week? 🥶

Students studying for January exams battled chilly conditions this week as the South Kensington campus’s temporary heating system failed to meet a surge in demand.

Imperial is in the midst of replacing its old steam-based heating network, as part of the wider effort to improve energy efficiency and meet net-zero targets by 2040.

Students in the Royal School of Mines complained that they ‘have literally been told to wrap up warm when we’re on campus as a solution’. It ‘is so cold that our teeth are chattering and the labs are too cold for 3D printing people’s MEng projects,’ said Sophie, a Materials student.

📸: Rolando Charles

18/01/2024

This year’s People & Planet University League sees Imperial rise six places, ranking 98th out of 151 higher education institutions. The College has been awarded a score of 40.4%, up from 33.4% last year.

Each December, P&P releases its very own ‘University League’, which it describes as ‘the only comprehensive and independent league table of UK universities ranked by environmental and ethical performance’.

But is it a perfect assessment? See the editorial in Issue 1838, out now on campus and online, to see why our Editor-in-Chief thinks People & Planet’s league table doesn’t work.

16/01/2024

Imperial has progressed to the third round of University Challenge, after coasting to victory against Lincoln College, Oxford.

The team of Lee, Jones, Haddad and Debnath scored 250 points to Lincoln’s 120, exhibiting their knowledge on topics ranging from Jacobean tragedies to 20th-century West African politics.

📸: BBC

15/01/2024

National treasure and legendary documentary maker Sir David Attenborough paid a visit to Imperial’s South Kensington campus in December to film for his new programme, Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster.

Wanting to understand how the pliosaur would have achieved the high speeds necessary to catch its prey given its large size, Attenborough spoke to Dr Luke Muscutt, a technician and aerospace engineering graduate working at Imperial’s Hydrodynamics Lab, who built a remote-controlled, free-swimming robotic plesiosaur named Flip.

Read the full article in Issue 1838 out now on campus or available online via the link in our bio! 🔗

📸: Jo Mieszkowski for Imperial College London

04/12/2023

Imperial has renewed its efforts to secure planning permission for a mural students described as ‘void’, ‘meaningless’ and ‘garish’, less than six months after its original application was rejected.

The mural is to be painted onto the western wall of the Roderic Hill Building, at the entrance to Callendar Road.

➡️Swipe through to see what Imperial students had to say about the mural.

Read the full article and editorial in issue 1836 out now on campus and online via the link in our bio. 🗞️

29/11/2023

Ex-Imperial lecturer Manoj Sen was arrested at his home in North West London on 10th November, and taken to Colindale Police Station, where he was questioned, before being served a caution.

Two days prior, Sen apologised for making a series of anti-Semitic comments on Facebook, including calling Jewish people ‘circumcised vermin’.

Sen told Felix that he was very sorry for his remarks, calling them “a lapse for which I sincerely apologise and regret.”

Read the full article in Issue 1835 out now on campus or online via the link in our bio. 🗞

28/11/2023

Did you know we run a photography competition each week? 📸

➡️ Swipe through to check out some of our talented previous winners!

We announce the next theme each week on our stories, so watch this space for your chance to enter and be featured in the paper and on our Instagram!

Check out the link in our bio to enter for this week’s theme: ‘Accidental Renaissance’

27/11/2023

An 80-strong car convoy was intercepted by the Metropolitan Police outside Imperial College’s Main Entrance on Saturday 18th November, at around 11 pm. Road policing units, public order teams, and a police helicopter were deployed to the scene.

The convoy appears to have stopped outside the College, and the Met says the group had plans to travel to the Israeli Embassy, near Kensington High Street. It is believed the cars set off from a car park in Hancock Road, Tower Hamlets, East London.

On its way into London, the convoy stopped twice on major roads – the A13 and the Limehouse Link Tunnel – ‘causing not only disruption but danger to other road users’.

Police are asking for assistance in identifying 15 men they suspect to have been involved with offences earlier on in the route.

Read the full article in Issue 1835 out now on campus or online via the link in our bio 🗞️

📸Photo Credit: Siya Gupta, rabbanitweets (via X/Twitter)

23/11/2023

If you’re a sudoku super-fan or a master at crosswords, why not join our team as a Puzzles Editor?

You’ll help to compile and create an engaging collection of puzzles (crosswords, sudokus, and any other puzzles you think are especially interesting!) as well as our weekly comics! 🧩🧩

Interested? Get in touch at [email protected]

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West Basement Studios went down to Imperial College London's Union Bar and asked students the REAL questions (whether we got any good answers is up for debate). Full video out now on our YouTube, link in bio!

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