Tag: news
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EUSci at the Fringe 2017 / Why do we need evidence?
When I attended “Why do we need evidence?” at the Edinburgh Fringe, I didn’t expect an event about the history of medical science to leave me despairing for its future. The long and in many cases tedious road to scientific discovery (which led to the discovery of antibiotics, genes, vitamins, and bacterial life forms) often…
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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…