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From enzymes to muscle tissue, the DNA held within the nucleus of cells contains instructions for the production of every protein in your body. Mutations in these genomic blueprints, whether inherited or induced by damaging environmental agents (e.g toxins, UV radiation), can result in proteins becoming malformed and dysfunctional and ultimately give rise to disease. […]
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Whales. Maybe they’re just a group of animals you remember from a nature documentary. Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to see them in person. Or maybe, if you want to be technical, you’ll know them as a paraphyletic group of organisms within the Cetaceans, excluding the Dolphins. As someone who loves whales, and satisfies the […]
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The UK is a country of bird lovers. We spend around twice the amount of money on bird seed than anywhere else in Europe. But could this love of our feathered friends, and our apparent need to feed them, be altering their morphology? Recent research published in Science suggests this could be the case. The […]
Continue ReadingBonnie Tyler didn’t realise how aptly her song ‘Holding out for a Hero’ described the lives of the Bdelloid Rotifers – in all three hundred years that we have been searching, we’ve never found a male, just millions and millions of females. Well, there was one single report, about 100 years ago, scantily documented, that […]
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Biotechnology is at the forefront of the twenty-first century’s biological revolution, developing novel therapies grounded in the mechanisms already exploited by biology. Biotech companies themselves are the minnows of the pharmaceutical world, streamlined for the sole purpose of developing these treatments—no marketing costs, just pure research and development —and aiming for the ultimate prize of […]
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Biotechnology is at the forefront of the twenty-first century’s biological revolution, developing novel therapies grounded in the mechanisms already exploited by biology. Biotech companies themselves are the minnows of the pharmaceutical world, streamlined for the sole purpose of developing these treatments—no marketing costs, just pure research and development —and aiming for the ultimate prize of […]
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This might disappoint a few but this is not an article about how Andrew Lincoln tackles to save our human species from a zombie invasion. In biology, the living dead is a concept referring to species whose only chance of survival is through rapid human intervention. These species cannot recover if habitat loss alone is stopped. Also referred […]
Continue ReadingWith a beautiful structure, elegantly constructed from silk stronger than steel, spiders’ webs have long been one of nature’s marvels. But now scientists have discovered yet another remarkable property. According to researchers at Oxford University, Spiders’ webs electrostatically reach out and ‘grab’ airborne particles, droplets and even insects. Electrically conductive glue spread over the threads […]
Continue ReadingIf you were paying attention in your Biology lessons at school, you will know that mitochondria are the ‘powerhouse’ of the cell, meeting the cell’s energy needs through respiration. If you were really paying attention, you may also remember that when fertilisation occurs, all the mitochondria come from the mother’s egg and none from the […]
Continue ReadingFor any author, having 70 billion copies of their book published worldwide would be a tremendous success beyond their wildest dreams, especially since the total number copies produced for the two hundred most popular titles of all time gives a comparably modest figure of only around 20 billion. So how did 70 billion copies of […]
Continue ReadingSarah Gashi questions science-fiction, Treknobabble, and biology in Twilight.
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