Archive: 2015

by Jordan Wilkerson figures by Brad Wierbowski The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued a new wave of regulations, and they focus on one thing: methane. Due to the EPA’s recent proposal, we have been inundated with stories about…

Presented by Nick Jikomes, John Hatch, and Kayla Davis Marijuana is a psychoactive substance widely used for both recreational and medicinal purposes. Medical marijuana is currently being used to treat a number of chronic conditions and diseases,…

Charles Darwin’s 1837 sketch of an evolutionary tree – the Open Tree Taxonomy’s tree has significantly more branches. Charles Darwin [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsIf asked what animal is genetically closest to a hippo, you might…

Standard packaging for a once-per-day oral birth control pill for women. [Monik Markus under a CC BY 2.0 license]Researchers in Japan have made a breakthrough in the search for a birth control pill for men after discovering that two commonly used…

by Mary E. Gearing figures by Shanon McArdel It’s hard to find a more controversial topic than sugar, which is never far from the media’s attention. From the recent hype surrounding That Sugar Film to the continued demonizing of high fructose corn syrup,…

Cells in your blood, like those shown in this microscope image, are coated in membranes that the body recognizes as non-foreign, preventing the immune system from attacking them. Cloaking nanoparticles in such membranes allows them to slip past the…

This Bovine Pulmonary Artery Endothelial (BPAE) cell is stained to show two components of the cytoskeleton – microtubules in green, and actin filaments in red (in the top right panel). The cell is a crowded place, so one of the functions of the…

Presented by Dan Tarjan, Justin Feng, and Jianghong “John” Min Biology is a new science. It was only about 200 years ago that Charles Darwin formulated the principles of Evolution by natural selection, and Gregor Mendel described the first…

by Steph Guerra figures by Krissy Lyon Reproducibility in science is not very sexy. Because our scientific culture generally rewards innovation over cautiousness, replicating a study conducted by others will not get a researcher a publication in a…

Presented by Katherine Phillips and Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling Science and art are often seen as disparate topics, but they frequently intertwine in surprising and interesting ways. In this talk, we will see how science can help us analyze, understand,…