Category: public posts
The select public posts from syn·op·sis, written and reviewed by iSci students at McMaster University. Each post is interdisciplinary in nature, and a wide variety of subject matter is covered. So sit back, relax, and start learning.
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Amino Acids: a Scaffold to a Better Future
Modern Westernized medicine is constantly developing novel clinical and surgical practices. These practices have been created in response to rapid advancements in technology and society’s desire for better, faster and more reliable treatments. The current need for reliable clinical practices has created a relatively new discipline known as bioengineering (Griffith, 2001). Bioengineering incorporates molecular and…
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Translating Thoughts Into Actions
Our society is one that focuses on the needs of the few, rather than the needs of the many. Nowadays, people become fixated with what they cannot do, instead of appreciating what they can. For a short individual, this may mean a time-consuming climb to the top shelf of a library, just to get a…
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Exploring Davy Jones’ Locker
Buried gold and treasure maps may bring to mind tall tales of swashbuckling pirates, but even today, “treasure hunters” endeavor to recover valuable items from shipwrecks. These haunting sites, mere skeletons of past expeditions, are both important historical markers and resting places for precious cargo (Figure 1). The exploration of such debris fields is a complex and…
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Those Cancer-Sniffing Fruit Flies
Over the last few decades, the importance of early cancer detection has come to the forefront of the medical field’s attention. Researchers are continuously trying to develop new diagnostic imaging techniques that can better detect cancer. Recently, animals have been of particular interest in this research due to their ability to differentiate between cancerous and…
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Artificial Intelligence: Siri-ously.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a fascinating, faulty mirror of human consciousness. It is able to demonstrate immense intellect, but cannot reflect human intuition or emotion. We tend to associate AI with robots from science-fiction movies, but it is a controversial reality in modern society that is constantly probed by human psychologists and computer engineers. Furthermore,…
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Non-invasive, Transdermal Techniques in the Detection of Malaria
Of all the infectious diseases currently plaguing humankind, there are perhaps only a few more difficult to diagnose than malaria. Caused by the parasitic protist Plasmodium , malaria infects over 200 million people each year in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and South America (Howitt et al., 2012). Malaria is transmitted through mosquito bites, in which Plasmodium…
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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…