Articles
Swimming against the stream: modern-day challenges to male reproductive health
The effects of a mother’s age, health and habits upon her offspring are well documented. However, far less attention has been paid to fathers. Dr Bernard Robaire, Professor at McGill University, Montréal, Canada, believes male reproductive health may be just as important for future generations as that of females, with a father’s age, health and exposure to chemicals all having […]
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Capturing images and data before the slides degrade into uselessness
Microscopic and enigmatic, the tardigrades are little known to science. However, their remarkable ability to enter suspended animation and withstand extreme conditions may support important medical advances. Prof Carl Johansson of Fresno City College, California, and Dr Lynn Kimsey of the Bohart Museum at UC Davis are documenting the amazing diversity of these secretive animals, and at the same time […]
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Making the Internet a safer place
Back in May 2017, a huge cyberattack crippled several of the largest digital networks in the UK and US, paralysing over two hundred thousand computers. To combat such threats Dimitrios Pezaros, Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and David Hutchison, Distinguished Professor of Computing at Lancaster University, launched SAI2 (A Situation-Aware Information Infrastructure), a research project aimed […]
In search of supermassive black hole feedback
Professor Evan Scannapieco and his team at Arizona State University have been investigating the puzzle of why the largest galaxies in the universe, once the most active, have become dormant and ceased to produce stars. They were one of the first to propose a mechanism that involved colossal feedback from supermassive black holes at the centre of the galaxies and […]
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Offshore wind power’s big break
The World Energy Council states that the capacity of offshore wind generation installed globally was around 12,000 MW by the end of 2015 with over 92 percent of these installations located in European waters. This will require innovative solutions such as the work being done by Professor Mike Barnes and his team at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Manchester University, […]
Supervolcano Forensics: unravelling the mysteries of the Earth’s biggest natural catastrophe
To many, if not most, the word ‘forensics’ invokes images of the very small – DNA, fingerprints, etc., – but for Professor Shanaka de Silva and his colleagues at the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, ‘forensics’ is being used to investigate something altogether bigger. The team is using a multidisciplinary approach to reveal the secrets […]
The Sun’s crowning glory: observing the corona
How do you observe a faint light next to a very bright one? Put simply, with great difficulty. Our knowledge of the outer atmosphere of the Sun – called its corona – is still fairly limited, due to difficulties observing this part of the Sun. Fortunately, solar eclipses (where the Moon and Sun perfectly overlap ‘in syzygy’) provide scientists, such […]
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Unravelling the signalling cues controlling vertebrate reproductive behaviour
How do vertebrate brains integrate information from external social cues and internal physiological states to produce appropriate behaviours? This is one of the big questions that Dr Karen Maruska and her research team at Louisiana State University (LSU) are striving to answer. Dr Maruska leads a research group that uses fish models to investigate how animals process and translate multisensory […]
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Novel 3D microscope provides unprecedented moving images of biological processes
Dr Chunqiang Li and his team of the University of Texas at El Paso have developed a novel three-dimensional (3D) optical microscope that uses a spectrally shaped pulse laser. Whilst most prior microscopes used scanning to achieve high speed 2D imaging, Dr Li’s approach obtains the z-position from a technique called ‘temporal focusing’ that use ‘diffraction’ rings and clever mathematics […]
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ACS: Taking chemistry to Hollywood
Science is everywhere. From your sofa to your car, pretty much any product you can think of would not exist without the work of science, and chemistry in particular. This fact is often under-appreciated by the public, but for Dr Donna Nelson of the American Chemical Society, she has made it her mission to change this. Following her work as […]