Category: News
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McDonald’s gets a makeover
A sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck in its nostril. An albatross killed by ingesting mouthfuls of plastic. A beach covered in plastic rather than sand. While it’s easy to recall these unfortunately iconic images, finding solutions to reduce such waste and pollution is much more difficult. However, one surprising corporation is making great…
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Silence no more – correcting hearing loss with CRISPR
Hearing loss is a health problem affecting over 5% of the world’s population. It is a complex disease, which can be caused by both environmental factors (such as noise pollution, medication and traumas) as well as genetic factors. One such genetic factor arises from mutations found in humans in a gene called Tmc1 (transmembrane…
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Fruit fly studies reveal brains continue to grow in adulthood
When we talk about the brain or the nervous system, the cell type that we most hear about are neurons – the cells that transmit signals throughout the brain. However, in the past couple of decades, there has been enough evidence to show that glial cells (or glia, as they are commonly called) have major…
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Can whales learn deafness?
If you’re reading this on your computer then you’re probably within reaching distance of them. Go anywhere amongst the public and you’ll notice that a lot of people are wearing them. Headphones and earphones are becoming more and more commonplace throughout our lives. Some particularly sophisticated versions can even suppress environmental noises and enhance the…
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Evolution through brain asymmetry
We humans share roughly 98.5% of our genetic material with our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. This extraordinarily high level of genetic homology highlights the requirement for small but striking genetic differences between these two species, as we look and behave differently. A team of Edinburgh neuroscientists, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Oxford…
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Brain implants boost human memory for the first time
Brain implants that enhance the natural capabilities of humans may seem like science fiction, but with research on brain implants taking place from the US Department of Defence to Elon Musk, it seems only a matter of time before such devices become a reality. Now, for the first time ever, a group of researchers from…
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Cancers produce painkillers
Cancer is often synonymous with pain and suffering. Abnormal cell growths produce multiple substances which increase the sensitivity and excitability of nociceptors (pain transmitting neurons), inducing hyperalgesia, a general increased sensitivity to pain, as well as allodynia, when a pain response is triggered by stimuli which do not normally provoke pain. However, not all types…
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Binary neutron stars: new ground for LIGO
As covered in our previous article, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has made several successful detections of gravitational waves. The latest detection differs in the previous made to date in that it comes from two neutron stars colliding with one and other. For the first time, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves in addition…
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Could human infective ‘Trypanosoma evansi’ escape sub-Saharan Africa?
Between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn can be found a diverse group of infectious diseases, most common in low income populations. These are called neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). One group of NTDs are the trypanosomiases, so called because they are caused by various species of trypanosomes (flagellated parasites). Perhaps the most well-known trypanosome parasite…
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Blurring the lines between biology and technology
How can one create a computer virus in DNA, you ask? Well, it is not as complicated as it may seem. First, the ‘virus’ program is converted into 2-bit binary data (series of 0s and 1s) and with each combination containing an analogue to the nucleotide bases (adenine, thymine, etc.). 00 is converted to A,…