One Phage Cocktail, Please

10 June, 2014 by

Increasing antibiotic resistance is hitting the headlines at the moment, and a genuine concern is growing, amongst the public and scientists alike, over the concept of a future without antibiotics. Research attention is beginning to focus on possible solutions, but some may be old, rather than new.

In the second half of the 20th Century, patients suffering from bacterial infections behind the Iron Curtain were denied access to the antibiotics that were saving lives in the west. Instead, many of these people were treated with phage therapy, which makes use of viral bacteriophages which kill bacteria. Phage therapy never really caught on, however, at least in part because bacteriophages are highly specific (meaning you need to know exactly what has infected your patient to be able to treat effectively) and because people are inherently uneasy about treating an ailment using a virus. Interest has renewed recently however, in light of major concerns over antibiotic resistance, and the European Commission has just invested €3.8 million into a large-scale clinical trial of phage therapy.

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Is There Such a Thing as Sustainable Fishing?

8 June, 2014 by

Globally, seafood represents 15% of animal protein consumed by humans, and the fishing industry employs around 35 million people world wide. Fish are big business, but not for long. That business is set to vanish in the next few decades, unless we make some major changes. Massive cuts to global fishing quotas and to our consumption of fish are necessary if we are to avoid totally eradicating all remaining edible fish in the space of a generation. The loss of our fish would be catastrophic – millions of people unemployed, millions of people without adequate nutrition, a collapse of the ocean ecosystem and the loss of many crucial ecosystem services. It may even make global warming worse, too!

But for us consumers, what can we do? Is there any way to sustainably include fish in our diets?

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A New Language for Life

29 May, 2014 by

All the beautiful, remarkable complexities of life that we see around us are, believe it or not, encoded at the most basic level by an alphabet just 5 letters long. The DNA code, which is shared by all life on Earth, is formed from molecules known as nucleotides which come in just four forms: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine. RNA, the single-stranded cousin of DNA which is important in translating DNA into protein, adds a fifth letter – Uracil. It is truly one of the most impressive feats of evolution, that such a simple alphabet can generate such diversity and adaptation. However, recently scientists from The Scripps Research Institute, California have engineered a life form with an expanded vocabulary.

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Eating Insects

21 May, 2014 by

What if I told you I’d found an edible source of protein that is cheap and easy to rear in captivity, releases fewer greenhouse gases in the process and yields a versatile, healthy food containing many of the vitamins and minerals we might usually obtain from meat?

If I then told you that potential food source was insects, you’d probably be disgusted. If you grew up in the Western world, that is. For nearly 2 billion people, insects are already on the dinner plate, and have been for centuries. Yet for some reason, in Western cultures insects are often considered less than palatable. If we could somehow shift this perception, however, we could change the world.

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The Problem with Palm Oil

4 May, 2014 by

In West Africa, the African oil palm has been cultivated for centuries. The plant was considered to be very useful, since it’s red oil-rich fruits can be used in a variety of products including soap, candle wax and engine lubricant. In the late 1840s, it played a key role in the British Industrial Revolution, and when it was discovered that the (west) African oil palm grew rather well in the hot, damp climates of the Far East, plantations began to spring up in Malaysia and Thailand. Palm oil is an extremely versatile vegetable oil; it is highly fractionable, meaning that it can be separated into many different products. On top of this, the oil palm is an extremely productive plant, producing 3.6 tonnes of palm oil per hectare; up to ten times more than other oil-producing crops such as rapeseed, sunflower or soyabean. Palm oil seemed to be an excellent choice of oil. Demand grew, and plantations spread into Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1930s. The oil palm is now grown on almost every continent on Earth, although the vast majority is still found in Southeast Asia.

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The Long Winter Sleep: The Biology of Hibernation

12 December, 2013 by

At this time of year, as the nights begin to draw in, and a chill appears in the air, the idea of simply curling up in a warm spot and sleeping through the winter months is very tempting. Unfortunately for us, Humans are not among the species which undergo hibernation. However, many other mammals reduce their activity levels during the winter, and a few undergo full hibernation, biochemically altering their metabolism to wait for more favourable conditions.

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All the small things:
DNA Origami, Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine

1 November, 2013 by

Believe it or not, out there somewhere, in a brightly lit laboratory, is a person in a lab coat, folding DNA, proteins and other biological compounds to provide innovative new medicines, tackle microengineering problems and create intriguing art. Welcome to the world of nantechnology.

The structure of DNA

Nanotechnology is the study of materials and devices smaller than 100 nanometers (10-5 or 0.000001 cm), and it is being applied to a diverse set of problems including drug delivery, nanorobotics, gene therapy, microelectronics and molecular computing. DNA nanotechnology involves the construction of self-assembling minute artificial structures from nucleic acids (the building blocks of DNA). DNA can be used to form a functional nanostructure itself, or it can be used as a scaffold to direct the assembly of other molecules (e.g. carbon, protein, peptides) into a functional structure. This is possible because of the strict base pairing rules of DNA, which means that strands will only bind together if they share complementary sequences. Base sequences can be therefore designed that will form specific structures. This is a major advantage over other materials used in nanotechnology such as proteins and nanoparticles. Dynamic DNA nanostructures can also be designed that react to certain chemical or physical stimuli, and DNA engineering is allowing scientists to design sequences that catalyse reactions, influence gene expression and modify the properties of natural DNA. Even more amazingly, DNA ‘printers’ have now been developed which can produce DNA strands with specific sequences, and bind them to a surface.

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Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Friend or Foe?

19 October, 2013 by

Is Anybody Out there?

The universe is vast and ancient, containing billions of stars. The likelihood is that other Earth-like planets, suitable for intelligent life, exist out there. Given the vast amount of time available, some of these suitable planets should have evolved intelligent life, some of these lifeforms should have developed interstellar travel, which should in turn have enabled them to colonise the galaxy within just a few tens of millions of years. So, we should expect the universe to be teeming with intelligent life. Any yet, we find none. Despite 50 years of searching, we have not yet found any evidence of extraterrestrial civilisations. We have failed to detect artificial signals in space, and we have failed to find any artefacts of intelligent life. This is the basic tenant of the Fermi paradox; we expect intelligent life to be prevalent in the galaxy, and yet we are unable to find it.

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The Most Succinct Scientific Study of All Time

20 September, 2013 by

Last night my friend alerted me to what is probably my favourite scientific paper of all time. The beauty of this paper is in it’s sheer simplicity. It is by far the most succinct academic paper I have read, and the reviewers comments say it all.

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This post is available for early view by patrons. It becomes public at 11:52am on Tuesday August 20th, 2024.

Can Chickens Change Sex?

15 May, 2013 by

Question:

Not the most pervasive of suburban legends, granted, but it seems to keep popping up. It goes something like this…

Confused Farmer finds Hen is now Cock
The mature hen, Gertie, who had laid eggs the previous year, suddenly stopped, grew chin wattles and started to crow.

So, can chickens really change sex?

Answer:

The short answer – No.

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