Jungle Genomics
The ability to point a device at a life form and identify it is a long-running Sci-Fi trope, but is it now one step closer to reality? Whilst remote sensing is still a dream,...
Category: Snippets
Chernobyl: How is it Affecting the Animals?
April 2016 will mark 30 years since the terrible Chernobyl disaster, which is still the largest nuclear disaster to date. After the disaster, a 30 km ‘exclusion zone’ was set up around the immediate...
Editing the Genome of a Human Embryo
The purpose of gene editing is to repair a defective gene which is responsible for a medical condition. Traditionally, gene therapy involves delivering a gene that is missing or defective to a certain part...
Studying Techniques: What Do the Psychologists Say?
Are you panicking about exams? Are you starting to regret not studying earlier in the year? Have you even resorted to sleeping with a book under your pillow? Fear not! Here is some last...
Breast Cancer Cells Create Their Own Escape Routes: New Insight into Cancer Metastasis
An exciting collaboration between scientists at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in New York and the University of Cambridge has revealed that breast cancer cells can mimic blood vessels. This ability allows the cancerous cells...
Focused Ultrasound: Surgery Without the Stitches
Focused ultrasound or magnetic resonance-guided high intensity focused ultrasound surgery (MRgFUS) technology is a non-invasive technique developed to target internal body tissues. In the 1950s, Francis and William Fry demonstrated that high intensity focused...
Novel 3D Vaccine Against Infectious Diseases
Recently, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have developed a novel 3D vaccine capable of harnessing the immune system to combat cancer and other infectious diseases. The vaccine...
The foreign within
A recent study, published in Genome Biology, claims to have found at least 145 ‘foreign’ genes in human DNA . In order to detect these ‘intruders’, a team of scientists scanned human DNA for...
