Category: Feature
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Three Space Diagrams, Three Missing Clues
Author: Jihun Oh Subtitle: Why Moon phases, Earth’s seasons, and eclipses aren’t quite what they seem Image credit: “Solar Corona of the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse” by Brucewaters (8 April 2024, Sherbrooke, Québec). CC BY 4.0; unmodified. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. A first-quarter Moon looks half illuminated. A drawing of Earth…
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When AI Starts Suggesting What Scientists Should Test Next
Author: Shammi Thakur Image credit: “Researcher at work in her laboratory” by Alessandro Ventura, photographed at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Research (VHIR), Barcelona, on 4 January 2016. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). What changes when artificial intelligence (AI) does more than analyse scientific information and starts…
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How do you find something you cannot see?
Author: Anya Sinha Photo by ESO/L. Calçada from Wikimedia Commons, 1 December 2010 Figure 1: Picture of an exoplanet in front of a star How do you find something you cannot see? You look for what it leaves behind. After an Edinburgh shower, you may not have seen the rain fall, but the wet pavements…
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Your Gut Is Talking to Your Immune System: Could This Impact Cancer Immunotherapy?
Author: Priscilla Wong Image created by Priscilla Wong using ChatGPT We often just think of our gut as the organ responsible for digesting the food we eat. But do you know that it is the home to 95% of our body’s resident microbes? What’s more interesting is that the gut microbiome has been shown to…
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When a DNA Sequencer Finds a Bacterium: Why the Result Is Only the Beginning
Author: Kasem Jamil Al-Saloumi A portable MinION DNA sequencer being prepared for sequencing. Illustrative photograph; not from the author’s study. Credit: Mongan A.E., via Wikimedia Commons; CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MinION_portable_sequencer.png. Image unmodified. The first time a DNA sequencer gave me the name of a bacterium from a baby’s blood sample, I felt something…
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From Dinner Plate to Immune Cell: Can Mushrooms Defend Us from Cancer?
Author: Priscilla Wong Image created by Priscilla Wong using Gemini We often think of mushrooms as merely something to throw onto our dinner plate. But could these fungi do more than add flavour to our meals? Could they also help the immune system defend us against cancer? For centuries, these fungi have been used in…
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Can AI help doctors decide how to treat brain cancer?
Author: Nardiena Pratama Photo by: Anna Shvets from Pexels What comes to mind when you hear the term ‘AI (Artificial Intelligence)’? Perhaps robots, self-driving cars, or chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini. Beyond these examples, though, AI is also used as a tool for medical research, ranging from early detection of diseases to drug development and…
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The hidden proteins helping scientists fight cancer
Author: Priscilla Wong Image created by Priscilla Wong using Gemini What if one of the best clues for identifying cancer cells came from proteins that are typically exclusive to the testes? This intriguing phenomenon is attributed to a group of unique proteins, termed cancer-testis antigens (CTA). CTAs were first discovered in 1991 and found to…
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Mind Reading? Not Quite: What a P300 Brain-Computer Interface Can Actually Do
Author: Corbin Lu Image credit: Illustration by Corbin Lu, 2026 When I first became interested in brain-computer interfaces (BCI), one description appeared again and again: mind reading. I can understand why people use it. It is much easier to imagine a computer reading a thought than to explain how electrodes record tiny electrical signals from…