Tag: science
-
EUSci at the Fringe 2017 / Skeptics on the Fringe
The Edinburgh Skeptics Society (ESS) is a non-profit organisation created in 2009 with the aim of promoting evidence-based scientific discussions and critical thinking, by having a lay-audience engage with speakers of diverse scientific backgrounds; from arts and humanities, to politics, biology, chemistry and beyond. The spirit of this organisation is well captured in their slogan…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…