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by Alexis Hubaud figures by Anna Maurer Vaccination is key to preventing disease and has been a major advance in public health to eradicate epidemics like smallpox or polio. Vaccines work by mimicking an infectious agent, and by doing so, train our…

Chopping tool made by early ancestors of humans, credit: Wikimedia Commons. Human evolution is a tricky subject, with very little information on who our ancestors were and what they were like. By convention, researchers have defined the evolutionary…

by Erin Dahlstrom Almost two years after its May 2013 purchase of alternative wind energy company Makani, Google X, Google’s semi-secret “moonshots” lab announced at SXSW that they will be starting to test full-scale models of Makani’s kite-like wind…

Genome editing, or using biological tools to edit the hereditary information of a cell, has been a controversial subject since the age of gene therapy. It’s proponents tout the potential to rid an organism of genes that could lead to incurable, nasty…

Two weeks ago, the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, returned after two years of extensive upgrades. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is part of particle physics, a branch that examines the tiny particles that constitute…

Neurons (shown above) are progressively degraded in Alzheimer’s Disease. [Image: neurons/Mike Seyfang under CC-BY licence] Recent findings from Duke University have implicated overactive immune cells as a potential cause of Alzheimer’s disease…

by Joseph Timpona We often think of viruses as foreign invaders– microscopic agents intent on making us sick before spreading to the next victim.  However, some viruses become enduring guests by hitchhiking a permanent ride in our genomes. In fact,…

by Grigori Guitchounts figures by Brian Chow For decades, we have known that specialized neurons in the hippocampus of rodents called place cells reflect the animals’ location in space. Meanwhile, studies have also implicated the hippocampus in…

Invasive micropapillary carcinoma of the breast, courtesy of Ed Uthman, Wikimedia CommonsA study shows that when a certain protein called Timp is lacking, there is an increase in the number of stem cells of the mammary gland (an organ in the breast),…

Scanning electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (brown) surrounded by cellular debris.Credit: Credit: NIAID/NIH (NIAID Flickr’s photostream) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons A 1000-year-old Anglo-Saxon recipe for…