- Jemima Stockton
What are probiotics or 'friendly' bacteria, how do prebiotics and probiotics like Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium and Streptococcus, help prevent illnesses
including meningitis, pneumonia, cancers, and inflammatory bowel diseases including Crohn's Disease ?
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- Martin Westwell
Ask any A level physicist why we see the colours that we do and they should have no problem with the answer. Martin demonstrates the principle of constancy - how the brain processes vision and changes colours - so what you think you see and what you actually see are different.
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- Helen Carter
Every day our bodies are assailed by microbes of all descriptions, but for the most part we successfully fend them off. In this article Helen Carter explores the basis of human immunity...
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- Thomas Häusler
Bacteriophages were big business before penicillin and other antimicrobials appeared on the scene. But now, with increasing bacterial resistance and the rise of the "superbug", phages are once more centre-stage in the war on microbes...
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- Harriet Dickinson
For anyone fresh out of frogs and tempted to kiss a toad instead, this article has a word of warning. Although certain species of toads do make hallucinogenic chemicals linked to a lively "trip", many produce a lethal cocktail of cardiotoxic compounds that could turn such a trip into a once in a lifetime experience, en-route to the mortuary. So which toads should you watch out for...?
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- Dave Reay
When more news comes in of rising greenhouse emissions in Europe or more political backsliding over the Kyoto Protocol, our building full of climate change scientists can be a bitter place to be.
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- Beth Ashbridge
Since scientists discovered how DNA behaves like a giant genetic recipe book encoding the entire suite of proteins needed for a cell to function, they've also been looking for a simple way to selectively and simply switch off some of those genes to find out how they work. Now there is such a tool. It's called RNA interference or RNAi and it's recently won the discoverers a Nobel prize. But how does it work and could it also be the medical answer to a host of problem genetic diseases? Beth Ashbridge finds out...
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- Ruth Williams
Humans have exceptionally large and complex brains. Ruth has a look at two genes, that seem to have played a role in our cerebral evolution.
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- Guy Brandon
The battle between Science and Religion has left us with a choice: faith in God or belief in a rational scientific approach. But how did it come to this and what happened to trying to settle our differences?
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- Frank Witte
Things usually are not what they seem, and sometimes the fundamentals become discomfortingly alien... Frank Witte discusses particle physics including what is matter, is matter a particle, or a wave ?
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