Category Archives: Stories
Science versus philosophy: debating the debate
It seems the debate between science and philosophy, triggered by Stephen Hawking, stubbornly refuses to evaporate, even though it’s a debate where if one side wins, we all lose.
This time the debate comes in the form of, well, an actual debate, hosted by iai.
The panel includes: developmental biologist and unrelenting philosophy critic, … Continue Reading ››
Growing a liver from scratch
Unlike axolotls with their terrific regenerative capacities, once humans lose an organ or a limb, it’s gone. And they need to get a new one.
To an extent, the human liver is a notable exception, given its capacity to regenerate fully from as little as 25% of its original size. However, chronic liver diseases often … Continue Reading ››
The longest experiment
Science can be a rather slow process. Sometimes the technology needed to confirm a hypothesis is not there yet, and has to be invented by subsequent generations. Sometimes repeated trials are necessary to make sure the conclusion is correct. It can take several generations of scientists building upon each other’s work to come to a … Continue Reading ››
Even plants can do maths
If you have three cookies and dinner is five hours away, how slowly should you eat the cookies so that you don’t get dangerously hungry?
This is the kind of calculation that plants do during the night when they are waiting for sunlight to come back on. Here’s a recap from primary school biology: plants generate … Continue Reading ››
Colonising space for all the wrong reasons
Assuming humanity gets over the existential hump all civilisations must traverse - where we're just smart enough to invent nuclear weapons and fossil fuelled power stations, but not smart enough to not to use them - then I fully expect us to one day colonise the stars. Or at least the planets orbiting those stars. … Continue Reading ››
A lesson in curing HIV
Of all the viruses known to us in the modern world, none other has as terrifying a reputation as HIV. According to amfAR, there are more than 34 million people all over the world who live with HIV/AIDS, and in year 2011 alone 1.7 million died from it.
A pandemic like that is particularly … Continue Reading ››
Pause to watch: Crash course in awesome
ATP, or adenosine triphosphate is my favourite organic molecule by far. (DNA is my second, for the record.) This clever little devil is the powerhouse of biology. It's no stretch to say it's the fuel that drives life.
And get this: it's so good at its job, that it's used by everything from yeast to plants … Continue Reading ››
One small step for Voyager…
There are two ways to look at Voyager 1's latest milestone and both remind us that distance on a cosmological scale is almost gloriously difficult to comprehend.
The first is to celebrate the first terrestrial artefact from this small blue planet to depart our immediate neighbourhood and pass into the void of interstellar space. Voyager … Continue Reading ››