The Stuff of Life for the Classroom
Are you living your best life – or bored by what you do? If you don’t want to keep doing the same thing day after day, then you have to shake up your routine. Do something different. Some of it may not work, but sometimes, some of it will and the results could alter your …
Your lawyer is on the phone. That lovely 100 acre estate that you visited last Thursday with a friend has just become yours. Beautiful parkland, ponds, woods, and a gorgeous home all at your feet. Then you wake up, remember you need to make dinner and scramble to the freezer for instant inspiration. You pull …
What’s the difference between cigarettes and food? You can probably list plenty of differences. They are probably mostly biased in the favour of food which, when done right, keeps us alive. Cigarettes do not. They may keep us thin. They may give us something to do with our hands and our mouths, but they do …
Tomatoes are possibly one of the easiest things to grow and display a huge range of sizes – from tiny cherry varieties to much larger beefcake ones. They provide our salad ingredients, the base for many of our sauces and of course, tomato ketchup. But did you know that cultivated tomatoes can reach sizes up to …
A sad week earlier this month saw the passing of Sir John Sulston. For molecular biologists, in a variety of disciplines, Sir John Sulston was a visionary who helped shape much of the science as it is practised today. He also proved that publicly-principled politics could triumph over greed and leave a vital and lasting …
Shine the spotlight on another type of DNA – cfDNA. This stands for cell free DNA. It describes a group of Dinky Amigos living without the protection of their whole village – or cell. Foetal cfDNA (known as cffDNA) is found as small fragments in the maternal blood of a pregnant woman. It is shed …
As Christmas dinner looms for those celebrating, are you any different from it? Well on the face of it the answer would seem obvious. Of course you are! Apart from anything else, if you were eating a dinner that was the same as you, that would make you a cannibal. In most cultures this is …
Gene editing is the new kid on the block in the fight against disease. This technology holds the potential to cure genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Type I diabetes and Huntington’s. Although there are several gene editing technologies, the current favourite is CRISPR-Cas9. This was used in a Chinese patient for the first time in 2016 …
Cash for genes, anyone? We’ve all got them (genes, that is) and someone somewhere may be using them to generate extra funds. How? You ask. How dare they! You cry – or maybe not? The Polymerase Chain Reaction (or PCR for short) has been around for sometime. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993, Mullis and Smith …
Those Dinky Amigos are an incredibly useful bunch. They can be used help solve criminal cases by identifying a perpetrator. They can identify relationships between current family members or ancestors. They can survive long after their host has died. In this case it is just as well. A woman in Spain claims she is the illegitimate …