Tag: Cancer
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Click-y LEGO® Chemistry!
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,…
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Manufactured Diamonds and the Road to Scientific Discovery
Throughout history until the present day, diamonds have been a symbol of worth and value. Whenever one thinks of a diamond, highly priced jewelry is the forefront thought. However, the emergence of the lab-grown version established a wider range of benefits to humans and even to the evolution of science. The first synthetic diamond was…
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PARP Inhibitors – Friend or Foe?
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…
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Your Ears Are Whispering
Your eyes do not produce light, nor does your tongue have a flavour, but your ears do make sounds! In 1978, acoustician David Kemp inserted a miniature microphone into a human ear canal and, for the first time, recorded nearly inaudible sounds originating from the inner ear (Kemp, 1978). These sounds have since been called…
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The Alien Cancer Cure
Traveling into space is one way we satisfy our curiosity. We cannot bear to live on our planet without knowing what lies beyond the horizon. However, the microgravity achieved in low Earth orbit at the International Space Station (ISS) can help us explore some of our many questions as well. For example, it is easier…
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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.…