Is There Such a Thing as Sustainable Fishing?

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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Eating Insects

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

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

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

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?

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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Dengue: The Neglected, Neglected Tropical Disease

Modern medicine can boast a number of triumphs against infectious disease over the past century; Smallpox killed around 500 million people in the 20th Century before its eradication in 1979 as a result of vaccination. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative began in 1988 and has achieved considerable success, with eradication complete in the Americas, Europe, the Indo-West Pacific and China. Last year, only 223 cases of Polio were reported globally. It comes as no surprise that those diseases against which we have had the greatest success are those that affect developed nations. Increasing attention is now being paid to the many debilitating and often deadly infectious diseases, which continue to affect billions of people in developing nations; a category of diseases known as NTDS (neglected tropical diseases).
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The Magic of Medicine: Gene Therapy

In the 60 years since Watson and Crick’s landmark discovery of the structure of DNA, our understanding of how genes influence disease has increased exponentially. For some conditions, an exciting therapeutic prospect exists: gene therapy. Gene therapy attempts to repair faulty genes instead of simply treating symptoms.

For many conditions, the exact genetic mechanisms underlying them have now been elucidated. While a lot of diseases are the result of a complex interaction between multiple genes and environmental factors, others are the result of a single mutation, resulting in the failure to produce an essential functional protein. For such conditions, an exciting therapeutic prospect exists: gene therapy. In principle, the idea behind gene therapy is very simple. Whereas conventional medicine generally attempts to replace the missing gene product or repair the damage caused by its absence, gene therapy attempts to repair the faulty gene itself. Why treat symptoms when you can treat the cause?

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Animal Personality Part II:
The Evolution of Personality

The field of research into personality and behavioural syndromes in animals has blossomed over the past few decades. With ample evidence for it’s existence, biologists have begun to consider its evolution; what is the adaptive benefit of personality? How are multiple personality types maintained in a population? Why do personalities exist when they sometimes result in maladaptive responses?

All these questions, and any evolutionary questions we might care to ask, make the assumption that personality is heritable. Without heritability, personality cannot be passed from generation to generation, and cannot be subject to natural selection. There is now plenty of evidence for high heritability of many personality traits in animals, although there is also an important influence of the environment too. Heritabilities estimates vary, from 0.22 – 0.61 in wild great tits, 0.32 in social spiders, 0.54 – 0.66 in humans and 0.2 – 0.8 in dumpling squid. These genetic influences may in part be reflected in brain morphology; one study in humans found differences in brain structure relating to neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion. More neurotic people have a smaller total brain volume and a smaller frontotemporal surface area, whilst extraverts have a thinner inferior frontal gyrus.

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Animal Personality Part I:
Individual Differences

To even the most casual observer, it is clear that people are not homogenous in their behaviour, and that this goes beyond possible nurture influences such as cultural upbringing. Individuals vary in their behaviour in a consistent manner; some people are generally more aggressive, friendly and adventurous in every aspect of their lives. So obvious is this observation that we even have a word for it – personality. Likewise, anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in the company of animals will almost certainly acknowledge that they are not all the same. The extent to which this is apparent varies from species to species, of course, but the observation is not a revolutionary one. And yet, until relatively recently the concept of ‘personality’ in non-human animals was revolutionary. And it has had to work hard to shake off the criticism of anthropomorphism and pseudoscience.

It was long assumed that animals were infinitely plastic in their behaviour, being able to respond adaptively to all environments. When people actually started to look, however, it became apparent that this wasn’t the case. Individuals showed substantial variation in their responses to certain events and environments, and these responses were not always adaptive. There was a strong correlation however, in the responses of a single individual over time. Personality, you say?

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