Jenni Ajderian

     One of the most interesting sidebar ads I've ever seen on Facebook popped up just the other day for NurtureDonors.com , a recent arrival to the UK which recruits egg donors and pairs them up with couples in need of fertility treatments. After a lot of reading (it's exam season- I have a lot of procrastination to do) I'm seriously considering egg donation, and my conviction that this is a good idea is emphasised by the fact that the website annoys me so very much.      It's clear Nurture Donors want young hip fertile gals just like myself both by their advertising strategy via social media and the fact that they insist on referring to their donors as 'gals'. A couple of times, they even call me 'girlfriend'. They over-use exclamation marks and they misuse apostrophes and hyphens and when sentences like this pop up my pedantic grammarian nerves are really close to breaking point- "A gals BF is often her Mom - if you are going to disclose

WOMEN     SPOKEN WORD     FREE     DISCUSSION     POETRY      Yes, we've added in some extra boxes just so we can tick them here, since this year's Fringe programme contains a whole section devoted to the still hazy title of Spoken Word acts. First things first- DO NOT BE SCARED. Yes, You, the one who remained a wallflower during our forays into improvised comedy, You who skirted round the Physical Theatre section of the programme, You who baulks at anything involving a 'fascinating real-life story' or puppets (they are creepy). Yes, You is, in this respect, Me, but we've gone past that now. My first Spoken Word event was attended on a whim and I'm very glad I went. Ranging from rap to epic poetry, this section is small for now, but promises to bloom in future years. A large amount of the performers here give their words away for free, and the smaller venues they occupy create a more intimate atmosphere for any performance. A lot of first-timers, but some o

(originally published by The Student ) ASTROPHYSICISTS AT the University of Edinburgh will be joining an international team of scientists in the search for earth-like planets in other solar systems.      The Kepler project, which since 1994 has searched the sky for planets similar to our own, aims to identify planets where water, and potentially life, could exist.      Edinburgh's scientists will be part of the team constructing an instrument for Kepler called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher-North (HARPS-N). Based on a similar device in the southern hemisphere, HARPS-N will be mounted on a telescope in the Canaries and analyse data collected by the Kepler project.      Dr Ken Rice, a Reader at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Astronomy, described the project as “the first hope to find planets like Earth”.      By observing tiny fluctuations in the gravity of stars in the Kepler field, and light we receive from them, scientists have been a

I could be worse employed Than as a watcher of the void Whose part should be to tell What star if any fell   I saw four shooting stars tonight. Lying on the grass in my back garden I was wondering why I know so few constellations and so little about the universe.      The thought used to be truly comforting. That however huge and important we think our lives are, there are things a hundred times older than we will ever be, and which will keep burning a hundred times longer. And we can see them only as one fleeting after-image of a life that may be already extinguished.      I've sat under the stars with a friend and talked the world to rights. I've watched a starry sky turn into a sunrise over the sea, and heard a thousand strangers cheer the setting sun and the emerging moon.      A kind of paganism seems built in. It's the part of us that swears at the rain even though all we're really talking to are bags of water hanging in the air. It's the bit that turns