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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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…
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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.…