Drug-resistant infections – the new pandemic? And, a tangled network of tiny tubes, pulsating beneath our feet. Fungal networks below ground sustain life above.
Drug-resistant bacteria are one of humanity’s great emerging threats. Microbes resistant to most or all antibiotics – superbugs, they’re called – just laugh at whatever we throw at them. In the search for new antibiotics, a group of researchers at McMaster University have turned over an interesting stone — cannabis.
The cedar is Lebanon’s national symbol. But Lebanon’s renowned cedar forests are not what they used to be. Today, all that remains of Lebanon’s cedar forests are a dozen fragmented islands, threatened by livestock grazing and climate change. The key to restoring them is their genetic diversity.
Donald Trump cited a frightful list of anti-American threats in his 4300-word nomination acceptance speech: terrorism, immigrants, crime, violence, gangs, drugs, lawlessness, government regulation, media elites. He had nothing to say about multidrug-resistant superbugs.
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Men are from Mars, women from Venus, a bestseller claims. Science confirms: male and female brains are wired differently, possibly explaining a lot,
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How it is that brains shed memory, while sparing lyrics and music, is one of neuroscience’s great mysteries. Can hardy music circuits jog cognition and speech? Hopes are high.
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Up to twenty percent of working musicians get struck by focal dystonia at some point. So do writers, athletes, craftspeople … an estimated 300,000 North Americans. The underlying problem? Normal brain plasticity gone rogue.
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You are what you eat — so the saying goes. In fact, the trillions of bacteria inhabiting your gut also eat what you eat, and turn meals into molecules that affect your brain.
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An estimated ten percent of Canadians struggle with depression, flashbacks and panic attacks associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). So do 14,000 Canadian veterans. Locked brain circuits may be to blame.
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Insomniacs are more than just lonely. Their brains are less flexible. A good night’s sleep re-wires grey matter and sheds chemical waste, boosting healthy brain activity in the day.
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In an agronomy lab and farm field in Montpellier, France, scientists are uncovering the secrets of one of the world’s great crops. The potential spin-offs for global green economies are huge.
Picture a landscape buried beneath a sky-high heap of dead plants and animal corpses. This is what Earth’s surface would look like if it weren’t for fungi. Fungi are the biosphere’s recyclers. Human society depends on them absolutely.
Rosie Redfield spat in a tube and mailed it to a Mountain View, California outfit called 23andMe. A month later, the University of British Columbia geneticist and MOOC instructor received the results by email.
Debron, Luke and Paula huddle around a laptop in a McGill University cafeteria, absorbed in an online game. No dreadful monsters, zombies or bloody explosions here. Phylo is much more serious than that.
Tom Hudson is a busy guy. Few have contributed more to our understanding of how the human genome works — and how to map it, using ‘haplotypes’ — than this congenial native of Arvida, Quebec. .
There’s hardly a facet of drug action that isn’t determined in some way by our DNA — by our genome. On a recent trip to Vancouver, I visited the offices and labs of the Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety.
Have you ever popped the recommended dose of an over-the-counter analgesic, and it did absolutely nothing? Or perhaps you suffered a life-threatening adverse reaction. If so, you’re in large company.
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Human beings can’t decide whether to cherish trees or chop them down. This seems to be the take-away message in a tenth transmission we’ve just picked up from a far-off planet in crisis.
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Earth is home to an astonishingly diverse array of creatures — as the voices in this captured transmission recount — but the planet appears to be in the midst of a huge crash.
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In this third captured transmission from a planet in crisis, voices describe how life evolved here.
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