The intrepid Serpentine Swimming Club joins The BMJ to brave the perils of sea – which have changed remarkably little since Captain Webb became the first man to swim from England to France in 1875
Celebrities frequently give medical advice and people often follow it. Whether motivated by good intentions or financial rewards, celebrities can generate much publicity for health campaigns by virtue of their visibility, public interest, and perceived newsworthiness. Steven Hoffman an assistant professor, and Charlie Tan a medical student, both at McMaster University, have attempted to find out why we seem so keen to follow their lead.
Sniffer dogs are often seen in airports, but Cliff, the beagle from Amsterdam, is more at home in a hospital. Cliff has been trained to sniff out the bacteria clostridium difficile, which is highly infectious and can cause outbreaks of diarrhoea on the ward. Scientists at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam studied how effective Cliff was, and found that he can sniff out Clostridium difficile infections in stool samples and even in the air surrounding patients in hospital […]
Fatal Alchemy from Martin Freeth on Vimeo.
Miracle beauty products may be a staple Christmas present today, but they’re not a recent invention. Diane de Poitiers, a French noble woman and mistress of Henry II of France, tried to use gold to preserve her looks – in alchemical law, gold was immutable, and alchemists and apothecaries created various potions to pass this gift onto their customers. For Christmas, the BMJ has made a film about a French research team’s investigations of Diane’s remains, and its discovery that […]
StickyTape X-rays from Martin Freeth on Vimeo.
New research provides evidence for an observation first described over 50 years ago – that peeling sticky tape emits x-rays. Hear the authors discuss their work and see the phenomenon in action.
Maisie & George Trailer from Martin Freeth on Vimeo.
The NHS is one of Britain’s largest contributors to our carbon footprint. This film is about the impact of climate change on babies born today, and how the NHS can reduce its carbon footprint.
Awarded a Nobel Prize for using lasers to control and cool atoms, producing the Bose-Einstein condensation, Bill Phillips is eager to hear about new theories from young scientists like Hannah Venzl. An exciting dialogue develops between them on a boat trip on Lake Constance as they dream up new collaborative experiments in the quantum world.
Overly aggressive treatment is estimated to cause 30 000 deaths among Medicare recipients alone each year. Overall, unnecessary interventions are estimated to account for 10-30% of spending on healthcare in the US, or $250bn-800bn (£154bn-490bn; €190bn-610bn) annually. This video features Shannon Brownlee, acting director of the New America Health Policy Program and author of Overtreated: How Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, David Himmelstein, professor at the City University of New York School of Public Health, and Vikas […]
That Beethoven suffered from deafness is well known, but how did the progression of the condition affect his composition? In this video the Isolo string quartet demonstrate how his style changed over time. Read about the science behind the video in the paper, Beethoven’s deafness and his three styles, http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7589.
Alice Stewart was one of Britain’s foremost epidemiologists. However her recognition came late in her career, having spent her life fighting the establishment’s enshrined views. In the 1950s when she started her work, x-rays were routinely used in foetal monitoring. It was Stewart who first showed the link between the practice and childhood leukemia. She went on to look at the effects of low-level radiation exposure – uncovering the true adverse effects of chronic exposure, and thus earning herself the […]
Community led total sanitation may not sound like the most cutting edge medical science, but the potential impact of this initiative is huge. Contact with faeces spreads human disease, and this technique helps villagers around the world understand how the practice of open defecation means that they’re, literally, in the shit.
To experience a French village in an entirely new way, go to : www.labastidevivante.fr
Explore this site to view a selection of recent projects or get in touch to discuss new commissions.
Back again at the 2015 Nobel laureates meeting in Lindau, this time, while Nature made several animated films about laureates’ ideas, mfreeth.com made three documentaries focusing on young scientists – and we supervised an animated film about orphan crops for Mars Inc.
A seven minute film tells the story of a simple but world changing invention by Josh Silver, and Oxford physicist.
To assess whether, as has been hypothesised since medieval times, acute fear can curdle blood. 24 healthy volunteers aged ≤30 years recruited among students, alumni, and employees of the Leiden University Medical Center: 14 were assigned to watch a frightening (horror) movie followed by a non-threatening (educational) movie and 10 to watch the movies in reverse order. The movies were viewed more than a week apart at the same time of day and both lasted approximately 90 minutes.
Mary-Ann stops British people in the street and she asks “Where is Germany on this map of Europe?” Many have no idea, many more know even less about the location of Germany’s major cities. But she also talks to singers, to the members of the Swindon-Salzgitter Twinning Association and to beer lovers who show much more respect for us Germans. She meets classical musicians, and a club DJ, to see how our countries have collaborated and still collaborate in the […]
John Russell, now in his 90’s, remembers bombing Dresden during the Second War, “we did not think about the people on the ground” he says. But in the remote part of South West Wales where John lives a ‘little Germany’ has been created since that time. This was where German prisoners were held during the war, and where the Panzers came for many years from 1961 with their tanks to practice firing. Special relationships between Germans and locals were formed […]
Mary-Ann joins a young English football team heading for the German School in Richmond. Journalist Luke Harding explains why our German team will win. English football teams have lost to Germany again and again since the World Cup in 2006… even so, the welcome English fans received in Germany that year, according to former German Ambassador to Britain, Thomas Matussek, made friends of us all. But back in school, why do the British mainly study the Nazis in their history […]
May-Ann drives our old camper van, Grace, to a rally in the South of England. She meets owners of old vans who love their rusty vehicles, but when they took them to Germany our police tried to crush them! She tells the story of how German cars such as the Beetle have overtaken British car sales since the end of the Second World War. Most insulting to the British was BMW’s take-over of the famous Mini. “The new BMW Mini […]
In this film Mary-Ann heads North to Newcastle where she meets students building electric racing cars, but they are given less than half of the budgets available to their German counterparts. In the electric future our targets for switching to sustainable renewable energy are compared with British targets. Young engineers take Mary-Ann to a wind turbine farm which supplies energy for 40,000 homes. And she drives a British prototype electric sports car which gets to 100 km/h in less than […]
