Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
JAMIE BARRETT Accounting for around 60% to 70% of cases of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease causes apathy and progressive loss of memory and cognitive function in later life. An estimated 50 million people worldwide have the disease, and in ageing populations this number will continue to rise, so there has been significant investment in this research topic. This has uncovered two unusual suspects that may allow us to treat the condition: the common herpes virus and bacteria that infect the gums. Early dementia research involved examining brain tissue after death. This linked Alzheimer’s to buildups of two proteins, known as tau and amyloid, in the brain. Deposits of tau create threads that join together and tangle up between neurons while deposits of amyloid clump together among cells to form plaques. In 198 4, this gave rise to the amyloid hypothesis, which suggests that these protein deposits directly cause Alzheimer’s. Subsequently, in the 1990s, large investments were made to develop ...