- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- Emma Gatti
The Pythia, the prophetess at the Oracle of Delphi, was said to be able to communicate with Apollo by going into a trance. But science has shown that these trances weren't down to divine intervention - instead they were the result of inhaling noxious gases from nearby geological fault lines...
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- Becky Poole
Dementia-prone mice have shown researchers than an old mouse can learn new tricks, given the right environment...
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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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- Chris Smith
Beating your head against a hard surface can be a sign of frustration, yet for a woodpecker it’s a fact of life. So why don't nature's headbangers develop brain damage or a permanent migraine?
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- Dalya Rosner
The joke goes that humans end up resembling their pets. But it looks increasingly like animals are having the last laugh as they too pile on weight to match their owners' bulging waistlines.
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- 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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