Before the coronavirus pandemic, bioengineer Jim Collins and his team combined the power of AI with synthetic biology in an effort to combat a different looming crisis: antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Collins explains how they pivoted their efforts to begin developing a series of tools and antiviral compounds to help fight COVID-19 – and shares their […]

Gareth Dorrian, Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Space Science, University of Birmingham and Ian Whittaker, Lecturer in Physics, Nottingham Trent University Two NASA astronauts, Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, have finally made history by travelling to the International Space Station in a privately funded spacecraft, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule. The launch […]

CRISPR is a mechanism that arose in bacteria millions of years ago to fight off disease Sheetal Soni, Researcher, Lecturer, Attorney, University of KwaZulu-Natal Researchers are racing against time to find ways to treat and prevent COVID-19. There is currently no treatment for the disease, and the World Health Organisation has created Solidarity, a global […]

April 2020 The human evolutionary path is complicated. It’s almost impossible to say exactly when we modern humans became “us”. This quandary is best articulated by the famous naturalist Charles Darwin in his book The Descent of Man: In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some apelike creature to man as he now exists, […]

Christian Schroeder, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science and Planetary Exploration, University of Stirling – March 2020 How the Earth got its moon is a long debated question. The giant impact theory – which states that the Moon formed from the a collision between the early Earth and a rocky body called Theia – has become […]

The end-Permian mass extinction is considered to be the most devastating biotic event in the history of life on Earth – it caused dramatic losses in global biodiversity, both in water and on land. About 90% of marine and 70% of terrestrial (land) species went extinct. This event may have been responsible for opening up […]

With colleagues at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand, we have found a new way to estimate the intelligence of our ancestors. Roger S. Seymour, Professor Emeritus of Physiology, University of Adelaide How did human intelligence evolve? Anthropologists have studied this question for decades by looking at tools found in archaeological […]

Mauro Vallati, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Huddersfield Will artificial intelligence one day surpass human thinking? The rapid progress of AI, coupled with our standard fear of machines, has raised concerns that its abilities will one day start to grow uncontrollably, eventually leading it to take over the world and wipe out humanity […]

  The cells in your body are like computer software: they’re “programmed” to carry out specific functions at specific times. If we can better understand this process, we could unlock the ability to reprogram cells ourselves. In a cutting-edge talk, computational biologist Sara-Jane Dunn explains how her team is studying embryonic stem cells to gain […]

Wonderkrater is the first site in Africa where a Younger Dryas platinum spike has been detected, supplementing evidence from southern Chile, in addition to platinum spikes at 28 sites in the northern hemisphere. Francis Thackeray, Honorary Research Associate, Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand Just less than 13,000 years ago, the climate cooled for […]