Category: News
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Inside the jaws of the tyrant king
Hady George explores how CT scans are revealing the inner workings of T.rex’s skull.
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Resistance isn’t futile
Like the Borg in Star Trek, microbes are constantly evolving to get past their host’s defences (thankfully they don’t tend to assimilate their hosts into a hive mind). They are becoming resistant to the drugs created to prevent diseases caused by them, and this tactic is far from futile.
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What makes us human may come down to the way our neurons process information
Clara Lenherr explores the newly discovered human-specific characteristics of neurons and discusses how the uniqueness of human neurons brings into question what we already know about human cognition. The ability of neurons to carry out complex computations when integrating the thousands of inputs that they receive is thought to be the basis of cognition. The…
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Can the body remove HIV by itself?
Two patients have astonishingly cured themselves of HIV without any therapy. Kevin Boyle discusses these novel findings and their potential implications in the development of a vaccine against the HIV virus. A recent report in the Annals of Internal Medicine has shown that a female patient previously infected with HIV was able to remove the…
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Drug found to have opposing effects on the minds of male & female mice
Tommy O’Regan tells the story of how, for the first time in medical history, a drug has been found to have completely opposing effects on the memories of mice depending on their sex. A team of researchers investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying fear memories at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (INc-UAB) has discovered something striking…
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Supermassive black hole: Andromeda’s and the Milky Way’s black holes will collide
Our nearest galaxy, Andromeda or M31, lies 2.537 million light years (or 2.4 x 1019 km) away. However, scientists have agreed that it is on a collision course for our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, with an estimated speed of 116 km/s. Most studies agree that this will happen between 4 to 5 billion years…
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Concern for the Climate Endures Through the COVID-19 Pandemic
COVD-19 may be cutting coverage on the climate crisis, but that doesn’t mean people have stopped caring about the climate. 2020 began with wildfires raging across Australia in an unusually intense bushfire season. Driven by drought, high temperatures and lightning, this was a stark reminder of how climate change contributes to the threat of natural…
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Music was my first love…
New research illustrates the potential for music therapy for people with Alzheimer’s. We’re all aware of the power of music – be that its ability to make you move your feet, shed a few tears, or take you back to the first time you ever heard a song. This power is being harnessed by music…
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Robotic Touch: Artificial skin brings robots closer to ‘touching’ human lives
When we anticipate the different future innovative technologies we imagine that the manufacturing industry will be completely automated, routine medical procedures will be robot-assisted and the world’s most puzzling crimes will be unraveled by robotic-detectives. It’s fair to say that robots have made significant developmental strides since their inception into our society. Although robotic process…