A new league table of international academic heavyweights puts UCL as fourth and Imperial as seventh best university in the world. ‘Best’ is a subjective word, so I guess I better qualify that. The assessment, by QS University Rankings, is based on ‘research quality, graduate employability, teaching and how international the faculties and student bodies are’. UCL maintains its ranking from last year, while Imperial drops slightly from joint 5th.

King’s College London also makes the grade, moving up two places on last year to 21st. Queen Mary, meanwhile, has to settle for 147th – but a marked improvement on last year’s 164th place. London School of Economics comes in at 80th, a drop from 67th.

It’s a strong showing for UK academia. Cambridge is King of the World, displacing Harvard from the honour. Impressively, eight of the top thirty universities on the planet are British, and 19 of the top 100. (Although, it should be noted that English-speaking nations have a head start in any league table partly based on publication record.)

The news comes at a time when UK science is preparing for battle in the face of government spending cuts (whereas many other nations are investing in research). If you care about these issues, sign up to the Science Is Vital Facebook group.