Articles Archives

Health & Medicine

Using a computer to fight malaria: Finding new artemisinin-based combination therapies

Malaria still claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of people a year and the World Health Organisation identifies half the world’s population at risk from the disease. Even more worryingly, an increasing number of malaria strains are showing signs of drug resistance to existing treatments. One approach that still seems to be effective is the use of artemisinin-based combination […]

Engineering & Technology

Optimising Particle Accelerators with Adaptive Machine Learning

Machine learning has become a staple of research into many of today’s most cutting-edge technologies. Until now, however, it has not been widely considered as a useful tool for online optimisation of the performance of particle accelerators. Through his research, Dr Alexander Scheinker at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA, introduces new techniques based on machine learning, […]

Health & Medicine

Sickle cell disease: Studying arteries with Doppler ultrasound

Sickle cell disease is one of the most common genetic diseases worldwide. Occlusion of blood vessels triggers painful crises and leads to various clinical manifestations such as kidney failure, leg ulcers, bowel ischemia, portal hypertension and retinopathy. Many imaging methods allow to observe vaso-occlusion but are limited by cost and availability issues. Dr Oluwagbemiga Ayoola of Obafemi Awolowo University in […]

Behavioural Sciences

Shaping a regional offline esports market: Jönköping’s success

Esports, also known as electronic sports, is a form of competitive sport played through video games. These sports are incredibly popular and have a growing audience of around 600 million people. Dr Brian McCauley from the Media, Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), with his co-authors Dr Kieran Tierney and Dr Dinara Tokbaeva, have studied […]

Behavioural Sciences

The new leadership paradigm for the public sector

The world is evolving at an unprecedented pace, which is forcing public sector organisations to adapt their operations and develop their leadership capabilities and behaviours. Marika Tammeaid, Director of Development and Dr Petri Virtanen, CEO, at the Finnish Itla Children’s Foundation collaborated to publish their book Developing Public Sector Leadership: New Rationale, Best Practices and Tools (Springer, 2020). Their work […]

Physical Sciences

Hydrogen? Just add water and sunlight

Hydrogen has been sold to the public as having the potential to be the ultra-clean fuel for the future’s economy. What’s less likely to be mentioned is that 96% of hydrogen is produced from natural gas, coal or other fossil fuels – producing it using renewable electricity is simply too expensive. To realise hydrogen’s full potential, the world needs better […]

Biology

How ubiquitin determines the fate of our proteins

Regulation of the multitude of protein-protein interactions that take place in the cell is essential. HECT E3 ubiquitin ligases play an important role in regulating protein functions and maintaining cellular health. However, many questions about their biological functions remain unanswered. Working at the interface of biochemistry and biophysics, Dr Donald Spratt from Clark University in Massachusetts, uses NMR spectroscopy to […]

Biology

Pipefish male pregnancy: Why do females prefer large mates?

Parental care is an important factor to reproductive success, and studies of care quality can help in understanding mate choice and other reproductive decisions. In the broad-nosed pipefish, males become ‘pregnant’ and care for their embryos until birth. Large and small male pipefish adopt different parental care strategies, and females favour larger mates. Researcher Ines Braga Goncalves at the University […]

Biology

Metabiology and the complexity of natural evolution

In his study of metabiology, Arturo Carsetti, from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, reviews existing theories and explores novel concepts regarding the complexity of biological systems while demonstrating the role of information processing and mathematical reasoning. On the basis of what is claimed by Gregory Chaitin, he perceives evolution as a hill-climbing random walk in software space, making biology mathematical […]

Biology

Dancing DNA: How Rad51 chooses the perfect partner

Professor Hiroshi Iwasaki, Tokyo Institute of Technology, aims to learn more about a biological process called homologous recombination, which is crucial to maintaining the integrity of DNA. His laboratory-based research means that we can learn more about this process and a key protein called Rad51. An increased understanding of this complex mechanism could be translated to the DNA repair processes […]