Coconuts, submerged cities and  microbiology are some of the highlights of University media coverage over the past month.

Blood clot risk investigated

Commonly prescribed drugs to treat nausea and vomiting increase the risk of potentially deadly blood clots by a third, the Daily Telegraph reports. Hundreds of thousands of people in England take atypical antipsychotics, mainly for schizophrenia, but they are also used to treat common complaints such as nausea, vomiting and vertigo. A team from The University of Nottingham investigated around 25,000 people who had suffered a blood clot, either in the legs or the lung, and compared them with non-sufferers. Risks were higher for new users, the researchers found, as patients who had started a new drug in the previous three months had about twice the risk.

Canned phrases learned early

Ritualised moments of everyday communication — greeting someone, answering a telephone call, wishing someone a happy birthday — are full of canned phrases that we learn to perform with rote precision at an early age, the New York Times reports. As University of Nottingham linguist Prof Norbert Schmitt explained, it is much less taxing cognitively to have a set of ready-made lexical ‘chunks’ at our disposal, than to have to work through all the possibilities of word selection and sequencing every time we open our mouths.

Protecting livelihoods

Nottingham scientists have joined forces with African researchers to tackle a disease which kills coconut palms, the Nottingham Post reports. The coconut is an important part of the livelihood of many in the developing world. But a disease called ‘lethal decline’, caused by bacteria, has wiped out whole coconut plantations in some areas. Researchers from the University’s Division of Plant and Crop Sciences have been working in Ghana to find new ways of diagnosing the disease.

Film threatened

A record of British life on film could be threatened from an emerging ‘disease’ which eats away at film, BBC News Online reports. Home movies on cine film, videos and even TV and film archive can end up covered in fungal mould if they are not stored correctly. The research was presented at a meeting of the Society for General Microbiology at The University of Nottingham.

Submerged city to reveal secrets

Discovered over 40 years ago just off the coast of Greece, Pavlopetri is the oldest submerged city in the world. Now BBC2 is to follow the first team of experts to have been given permission to excavate the site, eager to discover exactly what lies beneath the waves. The team, led by underwater archaeologist Dr Jon Henderson of The University of Nottingham, will use the latest cutting-edge science and technology to prise age-old secrets from the complex of streets and stone buildings that lie less than five metres below the surface.