Some of the trickier medical problems to deal with are those that are developmental in nature, as these disorders can arise through complicated menageries of genes and regulatory systems to create the negative outcome. And even if the culprit is just a single mutation on a specific gene, it often remains difficult to isolate, identify, […]
Often, while we may get useful compounds from the plants we grow, they can be difficult or costly to extract without specialized technologies. If one wants to only have a pure supply of a particular molecule, it has to be isolated from everything else that makes up the plant itself. And sometimes there are two […]
Plants and their interactions with their environment are always in the middle of a physiological quandary. When it comes to their roots, they need to be permeable so they can absorb water and other nutrients from the surrounding soil, but also impermeable to anything that could be harmful to take up, such as toxic heavy […]
There has, since 2012, been a problem in the biotechnology science community, much akin to the problems faced by the community involved in vaccine research. It is likely that many of you are already aware of the story of Andrew Wakefield and his shoddy study involving fabricated data and made up children where he concluded […]
Once upon a time, scientists thought genetics and genomes were fairly straightforward. A gene encodes a protein and that protein carries out the actions that cause physical, metabolic effects and even phenotypic effects visible to others. It was a direct and simple system, a functional way for something formed through natural selection to be built. […]
Personalized medicine has become radically different over the past decade. The speed and lowered cost of genome sequencing has made disease screening far more commonplace and as specific cell-based treatments have improved, some conditions that were once thought incurable are becoming very much not so. For immune system focuses, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)—T cells have […]
Occasionally, a scientific discovery can have such an effect that its immediate impact appears to be not all that worthwhile. But those with the ability to see what it might lead to can observe just what massive changes will result from it These kinds of findings end up rewriting fundamental sections of school textbooks and […]
Nitrogen fixation is a crucial part of plant growth and agriculture. Because the element nitrogen is a critical ingredient for proper development of plants, they need a steady supply of it in order to grow healthy and have a high yield of offspring seeds. For most plants, this is done by relying on nitrogen already […]
Biology, chemistry, and physics often overlap in topics they cover, necessitating collaborations across fields for this or that experiment. There are crossover fields that fall more on one side or the other, often depending on the particular technologies used in that field. But there is rarely a more intertwined field of study than that which […]
Defining the history of early mankind has long been a desire for archaeologists and others who study ancient artifacts of civilization. How we spread over time and to where and how our cultures interacted with each other proves a source of fascination and knowledge on when we developed technologies and especially agricultural techniques. The trip […]
