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Sexy times don’t help induce labour in late pregnancies
Even though I’ve never been pregnant, I’ve lived in the world long enough to have absorbed random nuggets of wild information, like there are lots of ways to try and bring on labour in women at the end...
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What makes the smallpox vaccine so great?
Perhaps one of the most incredibly effective vaccines ever used, against smallpox, has completely eradicated a terribly nasty human disease. Yet the way in which vaccinia virus, the live poxvirus...
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The journey to parasite egg paradise
The parasite, Schistosoma mansoni, is a remarkably cunning and efficient worm. It spends the first part of its life infecting freshwater snails, where it vigorously multiplies to bulk up numbers. This...
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24 hours in the life of HIV
Human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, only emerged in humans relatively recently, yet already represents a big public health threat. When HIV enters the human body, often through sexual contact or the...
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Antibiotics hit your gut microbes hard
These days, most doctor’s are acutely aware of the problems of overprescribing antibiotics. Historically given as more of a placatory gesture – ‘I have to prescribe something, else this patient will...
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Semi-retired cells repair our damaged hearts
Repairing or replacing damaged cells keeps our organs in tip top working condition. For a long time, we thought that only the incredibly rare stem cells in adult organs were able to create brand new...
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Supporting Miss. Muffet in the sixth millenium BC
I love cheese. Oh, how I do. Hard cheese, soft cheese, hole-y cheese, crumbly cheese, squidgy cheese – all of them will find a warm and welcoming home in my mouth. While deliciousness alone seals the...
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Ivory DNA sequencing tracks elephant poaching hotspots
The illicit trade in elephant ivory has been a ridiculous problem since the 1980′s, when Asian and African elephants were decimated to such a level that they made it onto Appendix One (“most...
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Converting weeds into flowers: artificial stem cells create a blood supply...
Regenerating the human body by growing whole new organs or patching up damaged ones from just a few cells scraped from your own tissues is a fascinating area of science known as bioengineering. Every...
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Making Pretty, Meaty, Friendly Animals (on Scientific American)
Head on over to Scientific American to read our second guest blog post!
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The Evolution of the Impenetrable American Bedbug
Most of us are quite content to share our beds with a partner or a kitty, but are less inclined to extend the same warm welcome to the common bedbug, Cimex lectularius. These parasitic insects, which...
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Eating too much salt sends immune system haywire
When it comes to knowing whether eating too much salt is a bad thing, there is a surprising lack of “verified-by-science” information available*. A certain level of salt, or sodium chloride, is a...
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Stem Cells Wanted: Alive Not Dead
Stem cell therapies are taking off, in a surprisingly unregulated way. While most humans have to go to places like South Korea to receive them, horses, dogs, cats, pigs and tigers are already being...
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The Science of Guns and Violence in America
I read a Nature News article recently about gun control in the USA that horrified me so much that I now have to write a bit about this horrifying topic myself. It goes without saying that there is a...
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How to survive the bacterial antibiotic revolution
These days, we have a pretty serious problem when it comes to our ability to kill resistant bacteria causing serious illness. People petition governments to urge action, while drug companies lament...
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It’s great to be a woman scientist; it’s challenging to be a woman scientist
I recently volunteered to help organise an event run by the Canadian Science Policy Centre that looked at the status of women in science and technology. To be frank, I was mightily fearful about...
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Fish parasite inspires sticky surgical tissue patch
(c) Myotis Surgeons still find it tricky to quickly and reliably stick a wet, slippery organ back together during invasive procedures. The currently available selection of ‘stick-you-together’ products...
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Turning insect viruses into cancer therapies
Gene therapy is a pretty promising approach for lots of different diseases, and has already overcome a huge hurdle with the approval of the very first gene therapy product, Glybera, by the European...
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Vaccine delivers an immune double whammy to fight tuberculosis
Vaccination is a hugely important public health intervention, perhaps the biggest in the history of mankind. While many childhood diseases are now effectively controlled by immunisation programs (as...
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A huge variety of fungi call your feet home
Human skin is a hardy, water-resistant covering that keeps important biological stuff from falling out of the body. It’s also a camping ground for millions of bacteria (picked out in magenta, above),...
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