With readily available pregnancy tests stocked across drugstore shelves, it is hard to imagine a time when determining pregnancy was not so simple a task. Instead of the easy-to-use plastic cartridge we commonly imagine, the earliest reliable pregnancy tests utilised Xenopus laevis, also known as the African clawed frog (Nuwer, 2013). This method for identifying Read the full article…
When it comes to the natural world, humanity has extreme difficulty imitating organic processes. From spider silk to bird flight, natural processes, while understood, can be near impossible to produce with human technology. The generation of organic molecules remained such a struggle, up until the foundational development of bioorthogonal click chemistry: a class of simple, Read the full article…
Multiple studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s concluded that up to 80% of patients who received psychiatric treatment were misdiagnosed (Klonoff & Landrine, 1997). Diagnostic shadowing is the attribution of a person’s symptoms to a psychiatric illness without testing for the potential existence of underlying physical disorders (Happell, et al., 2016). Frequent diagnostic errors Read the full article…
Some of the most revolutionary scientific discoveries have occurred accidentally; luck is sometimes the most important factor leading to new discoveries (Donald, 2013). Conductive polymers were an accidental finding by scientists Shirakawa, MacDiarmid and Heeger in 1977 (Guo and Facchetti, 2020). These organic polymers were found to have high conductive properties typically associated with metals. Read the full article…
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can develop after a traumatic event, with its impacts originating at the subcellular level (Girgenti, et al., 2017; Yehuda and Seckl, 2011). The pathophysiology of PTSD at this scale is characterized by a disruption of glucocorticoid (GC) hormone signaling, which has implications for other cellular processes related to stress regulation. Cortisol, Read the full article…
Breast cancer is the leading form of cancer in women, with 2.26 million new cases diagnosed in women in 2020 (IARC, 2023). Certain factors increase one’s risk for breast cancer, such as obesity and smoking. Another prominent risk factor is hereditary mutations (Cohen, et al., 2023), including within the BReast CAncer (BRCA) genes. BRCA genes Read the full article…