Archive: Jun 2015

by Mary E. Gearing  figures by Shannon McArdel 35% of the adult population is obese, a condition which puts one at a high risk for many diseases, namely heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. Unfortunately, the treatments available for obesity…

U.S. Capital by Kevin McCoy. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons The funding of biomedical research, through the National Institute of Health (NIH), has been receiving bipartisan support as of late.  The Senate has put forward a bill that…

Can flies feel fear? What does that question even mean? A study finds that fruit flies perform behaviors suggestive of a fearful state in response to threats. The authors go on to establish a new language for discussing and studying emotions in…

by Katherine Wu figures by Kristen Seim We live in an increasingly wired world: with apps for every purpose imaginable, it has become easier and easier to share information and build global communities. In the wake of the recent Ebola pandemic, we have…

BPA is commonly used to make plastic bottles [HebiPics under CC0 Public Domain license]Consumer pressure – not scientific evidence – has prompted companies like Nalgene, General Mills, and Campbell’s to remove a chemical called bisphenol A (BPA) from…

by Tansu Daylan figures by Kaitlyn Choi As Philae just woke up, we examine one exciting question of the Rosetta mission: what is the origin of water on Earth? A hypothesis proposes that comets brought to our planet this molecule central to life. The…

A bee. Image taken from Wikimedia Commons.Amid the startling find that the bee population is dropping, there are speculations into what is causing this sudden trend. Recently, work by scientists (original article here) have looked beyond pesticides and…

This April, SITN Waves, along with many other news outlets, reported on the restart of the Large Hadron Collider, or the LHC. Many similar headlines were seen last week when CERN announced the machine’s official restart. So when did the LHC…

The myxoma virus is only deadly for rabbits… and potentially human cancer cells. Photo by Larry D. Moore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. A common treatment for blood cancers, such as leukemia, is to replace damaged, cancerous…

by Vivian Chou figures by Anna Maurer What do sushi and pain therapy have in common? The answer lies in a tiny protein in our bodies called TRPA1, nicknamed the “wasabi receptor.” For over a decade, scientists have been fascinated by the…