Sticky situation

A company specialising in “curated” clothing posted a viral tweet on Tuesday (20/04) about an order received from ‘Cambridge University Mountaineering’ (not believed to be Cambridge University Mountaineering Club).

Matt from Rogue Print Company posted a picture of a box of shirts they had been left following a “miscommunication”.

The shirts, which the company is re-selling online, are a mixture of ringer and baseball T-shirts. They are a plain black-and-white design branded with the unfortunate acronym: “CUM”.

The company spent the afternoon posting memes about the incident.

St John’s fellow shortlisted for history prize

Dr Helen McCarthy, a history fellow at St John’s College, has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize for her new book Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood, which was published in April 2020 by Bloomsbury.

Double Lives is McCarthy’s third book. Her second, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, won the Best International Affairs Book prize at the Political Book Awards 2015. She was also named one of Prospect magazine’s 50 most influential thinkers in 2020.

The judges described it as a “stylish, lively account” of the struggles of working motherhood which “displays a deeply-felt respect for the subject’s significance”.

The Wolfson Prize is the UK’s largest prize for historical writing, and the prize money totals £60,000, with £40,000 being awarded to the winner and £4000 being awarded to each of the other five writers on the shortlist of six.

The origins of life

The University of Cambridge has launched a new research initiative to answer questions about life in the Universe.

The Cambridge Initiative for Planetary Science and Life in the Universe will bring together physicists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians, and earth scientists, in what the Head of the School of the Physical Sciences calls “a radically new approach” to answering fundamental questions.

The initiative will focus on: identifying the chemical pathways to the origins of life; characterising the cradle of prebiotic chemistry and life; and discovering and characterising habitable exoplanets and biosignature.

New Market Square restaurant

Cambridge City Council has received plans for a new restaurant business at 12 Market Hill, neighbouring Marks and Spencer. The plans include refurbishment of the Grade-II listed building formerly the site of restaurant Don Pasquale.

‘Market House’ will offer a restaurant, bar, cafe, tea rooms, private dining, and cookery school across several floors of the building.

In the planning documents, the applicants stress that they want to preserve the historic elements of the building, with their proposed alterations largely addressing aesthetic matters. The application also includes provision to build a disabled WC on the ground floor to improve access.