Archive for May, 2011
Facts for Digestion: The Negative Effects of an Animal-Heavy Diet
A jet plane streaks across a caerulean backdrop, expelling a stream of smoke as it goes. An SUV cruises along the road, leaving a quickly dissipating trail of carbon dioxide in its wake. A coal factory darkens the sky view, interrupting the blue patches with plumes of smog. These are the typical images which come [...]
NASA’s Life changing Arsenic Organism?
NASA held a press conference on December 2, 2010, about their discovery of a bacterium researchers claimed was able to use arsenic, instead of phosphorous, as part of its DNA backbone. This press conference was extremely well advertised and promised the existence of something extraterrestrial. But the organism in question, GFAJ-1, is far from extraterrestrial [...]
Stem Cell Research: Effects of the Patenting Landscape
Ever since stem cell research began in the late 1900’s, the field has been fraught with a variety of issues including bioethics, funding, and general skepticism. The debate on stem cells has been unrelenting, and policies on the field are usually contentious topics during political campaigns. Apart from bone marrow transplantation [1], all other potential [...]
Epigenetics: What It Means and Why You Should Care
Fundamental shifts in the way we understand our world and ourselves are rare, and when they do happen it is often with uproar. When discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 showed us that all of nature was bound together by a common molecular mechanism, it was assumed [...]
Harry Potter: Why Do Muggles Hate Magic ?
“Knew! Knew! Of course we knew! How could you not be, my dratted sister being what she was? Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that — that school — and came home every vacation with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats. I was the only [...]
Hidden Obstacles in Cancer Research
While undeniable strides in medical research over the past few decades have proven invaluable in the search for a cancer cure, there is no shortage of obstacles that remain to be addressed. Perhaps the most evident are complications in the biology of the disease itself: among these, problems pertaining to cell identification and treatment specificity. [...]
Is All Fair in Love and Sport?
In the world of competitive sports, one hundredth of a second – the time it takes for lightning to strike – can define an athlete. One hundredth of a second can mean the difference between winning or losing, fame or anonymity, millions of dollars in endorsements or none. Because we handsomely reward strength, speed, and [...]
Paving the Way for Moore’s Law
As long as Moore’s Law holds true, every two years, computers will grow either twice as powerful or half the size. This trend, in which the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit doubles every two years, has continued since the 1950′s and is forecast to continue for another decade. However, with [...]
Effects of Wireless Power Beaming in the Space Industry: Modern Applications and Future Possibilities
In an increasingly mobile society, we’ve found new and innovative ways to go wireless in almost every capacity. Cell phones replaced home phones long ago, and wireless internet, or wi-fi, is replacing Ethernet jacks at airports and hotels around the world as we speak. The advancement continues onward, as companies and governments all over the [...]
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