Category: News
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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,…
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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…