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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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Rising seas linked to global climate change pose a major threat to coastal cities around the world. Who better to turn to for nature-based flood control systems than the Dutch?
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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.
Plants that grow from seeds are the foundation of humanity’s food supply. Wheat, barley, oats, corn, potatoes and a dizzying variety of beans and legumes … Conserving these seeds of survival is one of humanity’s greatest challenges.
Of all the medical afflictions a person or family can suffer from, none is as burdensome as a rare genetic condition that hasn’t even been named. Winnipeg physician-geneticist Cheryl Greenberg advocates for patients.
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.
In the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains – in northern India – a very energetic woman has declared that seeds should also be free. We caught up with Vandana Shiva at her biodiversity farm north just outside Dehradun.
For those who speak and write non-Latin languages, being able to type on a ‘standard’ computer keyboard is a major barrier to digital democracy. In Cambodia, this problem has been solved and communities are going wireless.
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Human beings are deeply dependent on motorized machines to move themselves around. Trillions of these things now choke a vast and growing network of so-called “roads,” getting into deadly accidents and polluting the planet’s atmosphere.
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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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Ethiopia is renowned for the diversity of its seeds, with native resistance to drought, pests and climate change. Listen to 1989 Right Livelihood Award winner Melaku Worede talk about seed diversity in his homeland, Ethiopia.
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It’s hard to imagine a development tool more powerful than a radio station. For the past few years, a little station called FADECO has been promoting rural development in the community of Karagwe, in northwest Tanzania.
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What if — during our teen years — we each had to write a sex advice column?
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