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The Search For Unintelligent Life

Imagine an alien. If you’ve been influenced by movies and television at all, the creature you’re picturing is probably two-legged, two-armed, bipedal and with a reminiscently human layout – head, eyes and mouth somewhere near the top. And while most of us recognise that this vision of extra-terrestrial life is a bit silly, conversations about life elsewhere in the universe are often still painfully unimaginative.

Guest Blog

Genetically Modified Myths Examined

Genetically modified organisms, especially plants, get a lot of hate. People – even some very environmentally conscious people – seem to fear or hate GM crops. Yet, as someone who is very worried about climate change, very worried about the human-induced mass extinction event that is happening before our eyes, and worried about the livelihoods of farmers and about those people that have so little food they go to bed hungry every night…

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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Dengue: The Neglected, Neglected Tropical Disease

6 May, 2013 by

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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Selfish Strategies in Cooperative Society

10 March, 2013 by

Social insects show extraordinarily high levels of cooperation, giving up their reproductive opportunities and even sacrificing their own lives to save the colony. The social insect colony is a well-oiled machine, each part has its own key role to play, together forming an intelligent and adaptive society. Most people are familiar with the highly advanced social insects, such as honeybees and leaf cutter ants. Their societies are huge and intricate, and we have gained many fascinating insights from them. However, they tell us very little about how these societies evolved, or what it meant to be cooperative in a more primitive sense.

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The Magic of Medicine: Gene Therapy

7 February, 2013 by

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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