Author: isci
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Urine: The Unsung Hero
In today’s society, humans are impatient. Since everything is available at the push of a button, they find it difficult to wait for anything, let alone time-consuming medical tests. Sometimes it is difficult to remember that everything currently available was created through thousands of years of experimentation. There are many tests that have been refined…
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Efflux Pumps as Drug Targets
Multidrug resistance (MDR) has become a more and more prevalent issue within the last few months, as authorities say humanity has reached the post-antibiotic era, as opposed to approaching it (PBS, 2013). While currently considered to be an everyday commodity, antibiotics are important tools that form the basis of modern medicine, as they are essential…
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How One Fossil Changed Who We Think We Are
In 1844, Charles Darwin wrote a letter to his close friend Joseph Hooker in which he confessed that he was becoming more and more doubtful of the predominating immutability of species idea (Burkhardt, 1996). He was not alone. Since the start of the 19th century, intellectuals had been questioning the idea that species were fixed…
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The Concreteness Effect: A Comparison of Apples and Facts
Apple. Fact. Close your eyes and think about the two. Which one of these words was easier to visualize in your mind when you read them? The answer is typically apple, or rather any concrete noun. More abstract terms, like “fact,” “truth,” and “reality,” are much more difficult to picture in…
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Sleep It Out
On average humans spend a third of their lives sleeping (Underwood, 2013). Sleep deprivation had been shown to lead to poor decision-making, impaired learning and heightened risk of migraines and epileptic attacks. Even more severe, chronic and complete insomnia has been seen to result in death in humans (Herculano-Houzel, 2013). Yet for something so vital,…
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The Cure to Cancer could be Skin Deep
Our society has a fixation with the youth. Everywhere we look, there are emerging new products to overcome the aging process. Interestingly enough, a vast majority of these products employ the use of retinoid compounds, and a deeper understanding of retinoid metabolism in cancer cells could potentially yield a new target for anticancer drugs.…
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C’mon Baby Light My Fire (In Space)
Why would anyone want to light a fire in space? For starters, sometimes gravity isn’t all that helpful. For example, when studying the process of combustion, gravity actually introduces a number of complications. Most numerical and analytical models used in combustion research rely upon the simplifying assumption that buoyancy forces acting on fuel droplets are negligible (Space…
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The Root of Antibiotic Resistance
Antibiotic resistance is becoming a more and more prevalent issue in healthcare, where relatively simple infections can no longer be treated and may end in death. Major healthcare facilities such as hospitals will become central locations of transmission and infection, instead of a place to heal. Based on a report by the CDC Antibiotic Resistance…
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Vulcanization, Thermodynamics, and Elastic Bands
Whether they are holding your newspaper together, being shot at you by a friend, or just cluttering your junk drawer, elastic bands are all around us. However, this seemingly mundane material has some amazing, and even surprising, properties which can be understood by considering the thermodynamics at play. Elastic bands are elastomers and, like other…
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Vioxx: The Controversy
As a strong analgesic with a significantly lower risk of stomach pain, rofecoxib (Vioxx) was a wildly successful painkiller with a worldwide annual revenue of 2.5 billion USD. However, following mounting evidence and public discovery that Vioxx doubles the risk of myocardial infarction and stroke, Merck & Co. withdrew the drug from the market on…