Sex Robots – Condemn or Condone?

  High-end silicone, human like with realistic skin, hair, flexible joints. Not a description of Donald Trump, but features of commercially available ‘love dolls’. A ‘sociable robot’ is a socially intelligent robot that interacts with another person in a human-like way, which once advanced enough, will have the capacity to befriend humans. But what...

Aug 2017

Epigenetics – A double-edged sword to fight Cancer

Cancer Immunotherapy is rapidly becoming a clinical reality. Gearing the host’s own immune system to target and kill cancerous cells would provide a potent therapy, capable of not only targeting cancer cells with efficiency and accuracy, but attacking them with memory. Just as vaccination therapy provides memory against foreign protein sequences of...

Aug 2017

Veganism, Microbes and Overconsumption

The year is 2017, in the west, a co-cultural storm brews that will revolutionise the way that we view nutrition. Developments in metagenomics and metaproteomics, the techniques we use to monitor and understand the bacterial residents of our guts,  have revealed the unique super-organism in each of us. These are techniques that allow fast identification...

Aug 2017

Heredity to Heresy – the discovery of the Gene

On November 24th 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a now near-biblical text that would redefine pre-existing beliefs, scrap the notion of Nature’s providence to mankind and punt humanity out of the center spot of creation. Darwin’s theory of natural selection irrevocably changed our perception of natural history, a seminal work...

Aug 2017

Bluedot Festival 2017 – Science and Culture come together

Bluedot festival is a rare gemstone that inhabits the interface of Science and Culture. Winner of ‘New Festival on the Block’ and ‘Mind Blowing Spectacle’ in its debut year, Bluedot festival is an interstellar and long overdue concept festival that sets out to achieve unity in an exquisite portrayal of humanity through music, art and technology. Their...

Aug 2017

Durham Scientists Pioneer Tissue Engineering Innovation

The development of new innovative technology enables the advancement of the research and discovery process, and scientific thinking as a whole. For example, it’s hard to conceive of a biomedical sphere untouched by the blessing of PCR or DNA sequencing. Technological advancements not only offer solutions to existing obstacles, they open up new avenues...

Aug 2017

The Fight Against Phytate in Malnutrition and Tropical Viruses

Frail medical infrastructure in countries stricken with malnutrition has limited the collection of community-wide dietary data. Whilst malnutrition has been linked with economic fragility, the paucity of studies linking forms of malnutrition in zinc, copper and iron deficiencies with higher propensity to viral infection has limited the development of...

Aug 2017

The Fear in Immunity

It seems highly plausible that we have become victims of our own public health success: has the astounding triumph of multiple vaccination strategies led us to complacency? We could be dangerously close to shirking our apparent social responsibility and consequently endangering the lives of those around us. 1796. Knowing that individuals who had previously...

Aug 2017

Darwinism, Femininity and the Aging Dilemma

The question ‘Why do we Age?’ is one of those dove-tailed questions that arises from the unfortunate mixture of speculation and horror. From a philosophical perspective, and a very brief one at that, the acknowledgment of death as ‘the only certainty’ arguably formed the basis of culture, religion, and even human consciousness. If we are ever to delay...

Aug 2017

A Vulnerable Phase for Conservation

Shamwari is a reserve of some 25,000 hectares situated in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. It boasts some of the most sophisticated conservation technology, leading personnel and strategies for poaching prevention – prize resources not always available to similar reserves. The Shamwari Conservation effort is one that crystallises the sad reality of...

Aug 2017