- Philip Strange
Surprising as it sounds, one of the world's top tipples a century ago was laced with cocaine. And although the manufacturers have changed the recipe in recent years, Coca Cola is still a market leader, but why was the cocaine there in the first place, and where does the drug come from?
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- Bjoern Brembs
Flies are creatures of habit - at least that's what the latest research on the fruit fly Drosophila has found. In this article Bjoern Brembs explains how a marine snail started him on the road to uncover the brain basis of learning...
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- Ana Rossi
Ion channels are miniature pores in the membranes of cells. They're the gatekeepers controlling which ions can move into and out of cells, meaning that they control almost every aspect of life itself. This also means they're important drug targets. But to develop effective and selective agents to hit just the right channel means that scientists need to understand the precise structure and workings of each of them. A daunting task, but now new technology has provided a way to do just that...
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- Robinson Fulweiler
Equivalent in land area to 14 Isle of Mans, or Rhode Island State twice over, the Louisiana Wetlands are one of the most important acquatic ecological sites in the world. But now they're disappearing, fast - an area the size of a tennis court slips into the sea every thirteen seconds. But what is this wilderness and what can be done to save it...?
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- Catherine Zentile
I.Q. scores have been rising steadily, by about 3 points per decade, ever since they were first administered. This is the Flynn Effect and it means that if we take the average teenager of today with an I.Q. of 100 and project the trend back to the 1900s, the average I.Q. was somewhere between 50 and 70 which usually marks a mental disability! Surely this cannot be correct...?
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- Becky Poole
Why re-invent the wheel when Nature has already come up with the best solution? Becky Poole explores the field of biomimetics - quite literally how engineers are borrowing from biology...
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- Alexandra Cheung
We tend to think of parasites as evolutionary cheats, surreptitiously taking advantage of their hosts’ hard work while they sit back and enjoy an easy life. But a closer look reveals that it's not all sun and sangria...
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- Helen Carter
There are five million new cases of HIV internationally every year, and the virus is second only to tobacco as the leading cause of death worldwide. But what is HIV, how does it cause disease, what is AIDS, how do anti-AIDS drugs work, and what does HIV mean for Britain?
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- Charlotte Rusby
What do pop-up books and some of the most fundamental molecules of life have in common? Charlotte Rusby enters a world 100 million times smaller than the bookshelf to find out...
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- Catherine Zentile
Scientists have brought the world one step closer to the creation of the first artificial organism with the recent announcement of the creation of an artificial genome for the bacterium mycoplasma genitalium. The breakthrough is a major landmark in history, the switch "from reading the genetic code to writing it" but this new synthetic biology could be dangerous: is the world ready for this new technology and will it ever be?
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