Category: syn·op·sis beta

Normally, coffee is a magical thing. It gets us up in the morning, keeps us awake at night, and anytime in between it serves as a quick little pick-me-up. It gets a little strange, however, when some crazy blog poster decides to examine the drink through the lens of fluid mechanics – specifically, what happens when you spill a drop on…

Botox (onabotulinumtoxinA) can be a touchy subject—a fountain of youth for some, a sign of society’s growing fear of aging for others. Yet Botox is more than an aesthetic improvement. The face is intimately linked to the brain and emotional experience, and Botox-induced facial paralysis can alter a patient’s emotional world. Botulism neurotoxin A (BoNT/A)…

In his 1996 book The Dilbert Principle, cartoonist Scott Adams wrote “Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own” (Adams 1996, 174). Replace engineers with scientists, and the quote still holds. The desire to solve problems and understand what is going on around us is a fundamental…

In spring 2015, newspapers around the world reported that eating chocolate helps you lose weight. The Daily Mail ran it. Germany’s Bild ran it. The claim came from a published study. There was little reason to doubt it. But the study was designed to mislead. The study itself was real. Science journalist John Bohannon and…

Earthquakes have had worldwide implications: destroying infrastructure, displacing populations, and disrupting society. Earthquakes are particularly devastating because they cannot be predicted. What if there was a way to warn communities using the very animals that live within them? An early account from 373 BC reports that burrowing animals (like snakes, weasels, and rats) fled to…

The human cortex contains an estimated ten billion neurons. Using a cortical connectivity matrix, a form of square matrix used to map the probability of neural connections between nodes and parcels in the cortex, it would take, at a minimum, 10^15 bits to specify the data represented by these neurons. Interestingly, however, the human genome…

Have you ever wondered why sometimes, when you run your tongue along your teeth it feels slimy? Similar to sliding your finger on the inside of a water bottle you haven’t washed in a while? What could your teeth and the inside of a slimy water bottle have? The answer is biofilms: local environments where…

Contrary to their name, blue jays are not actually blue. In fact, almost all blue animals we observe lack the pigment entirely. This colour we see comes from a variety of structural mechanisms causing optical interference, impacting how we see this colour with no actual blue pigment used. Colour is produced when pigments absorb the…

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have claimed 44.1 million lives since it became a recognized pandemic in 1983 (Sharp and Hahn 2011; Swinkels et al. 2026). Comparing this to smallpox, which had an estimated mortality of 500 million over the span of 3000-4000 years, AIDs is killing at a much higher…

On October 5th, 2026, the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was jointly awarded to Karl Deisseroth of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University, USA, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg, Germany (Nobel Prize 2026). They were recognized for their work in and…