Name: Simon Proud
Job title: NERC Innovation Fellow

As Buckingham Palace today announces the death of Prince Philip aged 99, our archivist, Professor Stephen Blundell describes a recorded visit to the Department of Physics on 4 November 1960.

‘The Clarendon archive contains several documents describing the detailed arrangements for Prince Philip’s visit to the Department of Physics, part of an Oxford day out for the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, and in reading them one gets the sense of a different age, where protocol and deference were very much the order of the day.

A new paper led by Dr Simon Proud, research fellow at the Department of Physics and the National Centre for Earth Observation, describes a unprecedentedly cold temperature measured atop a severe thunderstorm cloud in the Pacific by an Earth-orbiting satellite. This temperature of -111°C is more than 30°C colder than typical storm clouds and is the coldest known measurement of storm cloud temperature.

Sea salt embedded in the dusty surface of Mars and lofted into the planet’s atmosphere has led to the discovery of hydrogen chloride – the first time the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has detected a new gas.

An international team of researchers from the University of Oxford, LMU Munich, ETH Zurich, BGI Bayreuth, and the University of Zurich discovered that a two-step formation process of the early Solar System can explain the chronology and split in volatile (like water) and isotope content of the inner and outer Solar System. Their findings were published today in Science.