Anna Wilmot explores whether there is a future to the male contraceptive pill.
Science
Blackhole Backlash
Natalie Tongue voices her contempt towards the misogynistic attack against Katie Bouman, responsible for the first ever photo of a black hole.
Toast to A Shorter Life…
If you asked the ‘archetypical’ university student what is their favourite type of alcohol, the response would be A LOT (and for a reasonable price, naturally). Yes, it is undeniably true that alcohol plays a big role in many student’s social lives, whether it be that glass of wine at the end of the day, […]
AI Don’t Think So…
Whether it’s adverts for the Amazon Alexa, Sophia the robot tweeting or ‘Black Mirror’ throwing its viewers into a hellscape where personal security robots routinely hunt and kill humans, our society has Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the brain. With its applications seemingly endless, an AI takeover does seem inevitable. However, it has some drawbacks that […]
Babies by design
Chinese scientist Jiankui has claimed, in a series of YouTube videos, to have successfully edited the genomes of two embryos. These embryos were then allowed to develop and produced twin girls with altered DNA. Their genomes were edited using CRISPR, a gene editing technique first developed in 2015 to stop the function of a gene called […]
Mars-ter of Worlds
Launched: May 5th, 2018. Estimated Landing: Nov. 26, 2018. Landing site: Elysium Planitia, Mars. A grand sum of $814 million has been pumped into the InSight project for over 2 years. The insight programme is a Mars lander, sent out to give the red planet its first ever physical. It carries three instruments to […]
The Day After Tomorrow…
It’s hard to deny that over the past hundred years or so, humans have made a bit of a mess of the planet; air pollution, deforestation, and (of particular interest in the news right now) the vast quantities of plastic that are we are throwing away, and that are carried by ocean currents to the […]
Grow a Brain
How do you make a mini-brain? Methods vary, but you want to start with some human pluripotent stem cells, stem cells that can split into multiple cells when you put them in the right environment – for some other organs, you can use adult stem cells too – and let them multiply. This means that […]
There must be something in the water…
Water water everywhere, but what’s in the bottles we drink? 1 million plastic water bottles are purchased each minute, worldwide. But, are we really getting what we pay for, or is there a hidden truth inside each bottle we guzzle? The answer lies in recent findings by the World Health Organisation (WHO): revealing that 90% […]
Tardigrades; Weird and Wonderful
You’ve heard of grizzly bears, black bears, and polar bears, but prepare to meet the fiercest bear of them all…and he happens to be smaller than a grain of rice! The water bear, alongside the moss piglet, is a species of tardigrade, a group of microscopic organisms no larger than a single millimetre in length. […]