Frustrated at the lack of complex scientific terms in British Sign Language, a Dundee student has created more than 100 new signs to help deaf people express themselves when talking about science.

For any new student, coming into a lecture theatre or a laboratory can be nerve-wracking – especially if you can’t hear.

That was the reality Liam Mcmulkin faced when he began studying life sciences at the University of Dundee in 2015.

Born deaf, Liam was the first person in his family to go to university, after receiving an undergraduate scholarship from The Robertson Trust.

He admitted having fears about what life as a student would be like, particularly when it came to lectures:

“When I applied to university, I was worried about two things,” he told BBC Scotland’s The Nine.

“Firstly, I was at school with 10 other deaf people but now at university, I was the only…

Can you be lucky if you get something you deserve? I felt lucky last week as I read the letter informing me I’d been awarded personal independence payments (Pip). Like a couple of million other disabled people, for years I’d received Pip’s predecessor, disability living allowance, without any problems in order to pay for the extra costs of my disability – but it was recently reassessed in the name of “welfare reform”.

It’s the oddest of things, “welfare reform”. You sit there, opposite a stranger, asked to detail the sort of intimacies you’d be reluctant to share with a lifelong friend. “Are there parts of your body you can’t reach to wash? Which ones?” “How do you put your bra on?” You wonder why exactly such lines of questioning are necessary, or how the tens of pages you filled out for hours beforehand weren’t enough, and then explain, as…

This is a guest post by Geek ‘n’ Proud who Tweets @geeknproud42.

Do my wheels look big in this?

Why am I asking this? To clarify, I am not talking about whether your wheelchair, if you use one, has a good fashion sense. However, I am going to discuss a topic which I hope you will find equally, if not more interesting, and that is the potential frustrations that many people with disabilities can face, with respect to sexual and romantic relationships. I speak from the perspective of mainly my personal experiences, and hopefully I will be able to draw some conclusions from it, which may be useful to you.

So, before we start with my story, let’s remember that, although I can tell you what worked for me, there is not one magic bullet that will ensure that everyone who has a disability will have a happy and fulfilled…

There remains a heavy taboo around sex and disability in our culture. Research by the charity Scope found that only 7% of non-disabled people have dated a disabled person, while disabled young people are let down when it comes to sex education, often receiving none at all, or nothing appropriate to their needs.

The writer and activist Penny Pepper, who writes extensively about disability and sex, including in her erotica collection Desires Reborn, told me: “If disabled people aren’t having sex, they would like to. And the reasons they’re not are overwhelmingly to do with the barriers in society. I’ve known quite a few disabled people who [because of this] have resigned themselves to never having sex.”

This isn’t just wrong because of the obvious: sex is fun, enables procreation and for many people is vital for wellbeing. It’s also wrong because it’s part of a…

A grieving daughter furiously handed an urn containing her mother’s ashes to a benefit health care professional who turned up to assess if the dead woman was fit for work, following an inexcusable and heartless blunder by the Department for Work and Pensions. 

Louise Broxton had suffered a host of neurological problems for which she received welfare support. She tragically died from lung cancer at the age of just 47 in August.

Her daughter, Hatti, immediately informed the authorities of her mother’s death and all her benefits were cancelled. After initially saying the information had been placed on file, however, some seven months later the Department for Work and Pensions sent an assessor to the door of her home in Wolverhampton to see if Louise was “fit for work.”

Hatti, a prison administrator, said: “I’m so upset and angry about what’s happened.

“It’s our government that has done this…

Doctors say a stem cell transplant could be a “game changer” for many patients with multiple sclerosis.

Results from an international trial show that it was able to stop the disease and improve symptoms.

It involves wiping out a patient’s immune system using cancer drugs and then rebooting it with a stem cell transplant.

Louise Willetts, 36, from Rotherham, is now symptom-free and told me: “It feels like a miracle.”

A total of 100,000 people in the UK have MS, which attacks nerves in the brain and spinal cord.

Just over 100 patients took part in the trial, in hospitals in Chicago, Sheffield, Uppsala in Sweden and Sao Paolo in Brazil.

They all had relapsing remitting MS – where attacks or relapses are followed by periods of remission.

The interim results were released at the annual meeting of the European Society for Bone and Marrow Transplantation in Lisbon.

The patients…

Tens of thousands of severely disabled and ill claimants are set to receive backdated payments of up to £20,000 after being wrongly underpaid for years by social security officials, the government spending watchdog has revealed.

An estimated 70,000 claimants were underpaid about £340m between 2011 and 2014 after being transferred from older benefits on to employment and support allowance (ESA) during a government overhaul of incapacity benefits, the National Audit Office (NAO) said.

The error occurred when officials at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) failed to follow their own legal guidelines governing the transfer process, meaning that in many cases they failed to properly check claimants’ full entitlements.

Meg Hillier, the chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said: “The government’s shoddy administration of ESA has resulted in vulnerable people being deprived of thousands of pounds they were legally entitled to. The NAO’s report shows the DWP was…

Oscar-winning British short film The Silent Child is to be shown on BBC One on Good Friday, giving UK viewers the first chance to see it.

Written and directed by ex-Hollyoaks stars Rachel Shenton and Chris Overton, the 20-minute film tells of a young deaf girl who struggles to communicate.

Maisie Sly, a six-year-old girl from Swindon, plays the title role.

She travelled to Los Angeles earlier this month to attend the Oscars and see her film named the winner.

Shenton, who is from Stoke-On-Trent, was inspired to write the film because of her own family’s experience.

When she was 12 her father went deaf after receiving treatment for chemotherapy.

She learned sign language and became a qualified British Sign Language Interpreter and ambassador for the National Deaf Children’s Society.

She and Overton, who is now her fiance, cast Maisie after conducting a nationwide search and auditioning 100 children.

Millions…

I really wish I could remember when the lovely people from Bloomsbury came to my house along with the two lovely guys from the animation company……..but I can’t…It must have been before Christmas as the animators were kind enough to send me the original prints used in the animation, which I framed and gave one each to Sarah and Gemma for Christmas.

I do remember having a wonderful day and laughing lots…..

They wanted to produce a simple yet beautiful animation to promote my book, and beautiful it certainly is, especially since my girls have become 2 cartoon characters within it🤣

Well we had to keep the animation under wraps until this week, which has been so hard that I had to delete the email with any mention of it so it wouldn’t pop into my head.

Secrets are usually very safe with me, for obvious reasons, but I often…