Category: News
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Beebread and royal jelly: you are what you eat?
Social insects, such as honeybees (Apis mellifera), provide fascinating examples of natural social structures. These insects have a well-defined caste system, whereby tasks are divided depending on the “social class”. Queen bees are characterised by their remarkable reproductive capacity, large body size, and a marked longevity of life. Given their reproductive capacity, the main role…
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Cosmologists shed light on dark matter distribution across the universe
For the last few decades, researchers in Astronomy and Cosmology have been trying to understand how the universe has evolved at its very early stage, by chasing the oldest light around us. To understand the procedure, imagine that we are given an empty field and have been told to turn it into a forest. We…
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Starving malaria?
Malaria is one of the most common and deadly tropical diseases, causing a wide range of symptoms, including brain damage and, in the most severe cases, coma (known as “cerebral malaria”). It is produced by a species of parasites known as Plasmodium, which are passed to humans by blood-feeding mosquitoes. The latest estimates from the World…
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Fighting antibiotic resistance with nothing new
In 2013, the American Centre for Disease Control warned that humanity is approaching a “post-antibiotic era”, a time where bacterial infections become untreatable and mortality rates soar. Even today, multi-drug resistant bacteria are attributed with causing the deaths of 23,000 Americans (more than double that of gun-related homicides) and 25,000 Europeans every year. A major…
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Ancestral interbreeding: our Neanderthal relatives may be closer than we thought
Neanderthals, our enigmatic and extinct relatives, may have been even more closely related to us then we thought, new research suggests. It is well established that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals in Europe around 50,000 years ago, leaving Eurasians with around 1-3% of our genome containing Neanderthal DNA. However, it now appears that this was…
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The clock is tic-ing for Tourette’s syndrome
Tourette Syndrome, or simply Tourette’s, has historically captured the public eye, and ear, by being simply too bizarre to ignore. It causes sufferers to perform ‘tics’ – brief involuntary actions such as arm movements and fragments of speech. Notoriously, the vocal tics can sometimes be socially inappropriate, e.g. swear words, horrific obscenities or comments on…
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Exoplanet data: a new frontier?
June 19th, 2017 – The Kepler space telescope, quietly searching for a twin to Earth, has scanned the light of thousands of stars for the signature dimming of light, indicating planets traversing their surface via orbit. Eight years on and NASA has released the final data from the original Kepler mission, comprising 219 verified planet…
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Artificial intelligence is improving Down syndrome diagnosis
Artificial intelligence is being widely employed across research and applied medicine, offering attractive new opportunities for diagnosis and treatment. Recently, a team of research groups from the Netherlands, Cyprus and the UK proposed an algorithm to improve diagnosis of trisomy 21, or Down syndrome. Their results were published in the most recent ‘Ultrasound in Obstetrics and…
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LIGO makes third detection of gravitational waves
It is not often that people associate Albert Einstein with getting something wrong, yet even he made a mistake when he could not bring himself to believe in the existence of gravitational waves, as predicted by his own theory of general relativity. Luckily he was dissuaded from withholding his astonishing findings by a colleague, though…
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Learning to read changes the adult brain
Reading is an activity that does not come to us naturally, but with gradual learning can have a profound impact on our brains. In her book “Proust and the Squid”, Maryanne Wolf describes the long process of reading acquisition by ancient civilisations – from simple writing systems and tokens to creation of alphabets that provided…