Ancient Tweaking

Twenty years ago, scientists knew nothing of the scraps of RNA that are now known to influence just about every process in our bodies. Back then, the textbooks were simpler: genes code for proteins via the intermediate of RNA, and proteins called transcription factors regulate other proteins. This recipe was so entrenched in the basic [...]

Shaping up HIV

In the 1960s, a Danish company, seeking to improve on the traditional football made from the bladder and stomach of animals, invented the modern football. The designers realised that to form a perfect ball they needed to combine 20 leather hexagons with 12 pentagons, and in so doing demonstrated one of the basic laws of [...]

Cue factors

Our genes were once thought to be responsible for shaping who we are. But now scientists are having a rethink. Thanks to a glut of data from new sequencing projects, researchers are beginning to recognise that the regions of the human genome that encode proteins are unlikely to be behind the millions of differences between [...]

Surviving drought

We’ve all felt it: a quickening of the heart and a slight shortness of breath as you walk into an exam room. Most of us recognise that the hormone adrenaline is responsible for this reaction, but we’re not unique in responding to stress with a release of hormones.
Plants do this too – but unlike you [...]

Aberrant appendages

Having a second pair of hands might seem like an advantage but animals born with extra limbs, because of changes in their DNA, generally do not fair well. For more than 25 years, scientists have known about the existence of a mutation in a fruit fly gene that causes just such aberrant appendages, yet the [...]

Pinning the tail on the histone

Nearly 60 years ago, Pamela Lewis, a geneticist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, noticed that some of the flies she was experimenting on had tiny comb-like structures on their second and third pairs of legs, and not
just the first pair as is usual.
Lewis called these structures ‘sex-combs‘ because males use them [...]

Waxing cutaneous

When we’re in the bath, our skin prevents both water from moving into our bodies and essential nutrients from leaching into the tub. But because most of us don’t spend our entire lives submerged underwater, our skin’s chief role is to control how much water evaporates from our bodies. In fact, the skin’s role as [...]

Decloaking the germ

The bacterium Listeria infects humans through contaminated food. Once in the gut, this pathogen can be life-threatening if contracted during pregnancy or by newborns and those with weakened immune systems.
But for most people, an encounter with Listeria causes nothing more than vomiting and diarrhoea because our immune system recognises the
long, propeller-like projections on the bacterial [...]

A nervous switch

In 1863 a Heidelberg doctor described a devastating neurodegenerative condition that causes children to forget how to walk and talk before their teens.
The symptoms begin with muscle weakness, poor balance and a slurring of speech, and develop into a gradual breakdown in all motor control.
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NYTimes’ article: Interesting case for ’tissue rights’:

NYTimes’ article on Indian tribe winning their fight to limit research of its DNA

NYTimes says science articles are the most emailed

NYTimes says science articles are the most emailed

Open Science

What is open science? I talk to Michael Nielsen about Open Notebook Science, the Galaxy Zoo Project and the Open Dinosaur Project for CBC’s Spark to get at what happens when science opens up to everyone by moving online.

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Forensic linguistics and sentiment analysis

What do your text messages say about you? I investigate forensic linguistics and sentiment analysis for CBC’s Spark..

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Early rocks to reveal their ages

A new technique has been helping scientists piece together how the Earth’s continents were arranged 2.5 billion years ago. The novel method allows scientists to recover rare minerals from rocks.
By analysing the composition of these minerals, researchers can precisely date ancient volcanic rocks for the first time. By aligning rocks that have a [...]

Space storm’s ‘epicentre’ found

The precise spot at which a space storm struck the Earth’s outer atmosphere has been pinpointed for the first time. These storms are caused by the bending and stretching of the Earth’s magnetic field by material from the Sun.
Observations like this may one day lead to better forecasting of these events, a meeting of [...]

Space rock yields carbon bounty

Formic acid, a molecule implicated in the origins of life, has been found at record levels on a meteorite that fell into a Canadian lake in 2000. Cold temperatures on Tagish Lake prevented the volatile chemical from dissipating quickly.
An analysis showed four times more formic acid in the fragments than has been recorded on [...]

A Musical Memory Tour

For many of us, songs by the Beatles trigger vivid and specific memories. What’s going on in our brains when this happens and what makes a tune ‘catchy’? In this show, we go on a musical memory tour to the famous Cavern Club, successor to the Beatles’ first venue, to find the links between memory and music.

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Facial Recognition

How do we recognise faces and are there different ways of doing it in different parts of the World? I researched a piece for BBC Radio Four’s Material World.

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Sound Masking

How has the brain evolved to cope in a noisy world? I investigate how the brain overcomes the problem of sound masking for BBC World Service’s Science in Action.

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Morning sickness may be sign of a bright baby

SICK of morning sickness? Take heart: it may be a sign that your child is developing a high IQ.
Irena Nulman and colleagues at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, contacted 120 women who years earlier had called a morning sickness hotline. Thirty did not have morning sickness, but the researchers asked the rest [...]