It’s cold down there. Icy cold. It’s dark. Pitch black, in fact. And the crushing pressures make the deepest parts of the oceans into some of the most hostile places on our planet.
Continue reading Sailing the Lower Midnight… – The Uncharted Frontier of Modern Deep Sea Exploration
It comes at you as a breeze. As a gust. As a gale. Or in the scariest of situations as a hurricane or a tornado with wind speeds of up to 400 kilometres an hour. But what is wind?
Continue reading Global Winds and The Coriolis Effect – The Ever Changing Atmospheric System
A revolution in the treatment and understanding of clinical depression may be looming. And specialists are already talking about one of the strongest discoveries in psychiatry for the past two decades. For the 350 million people who suffer from the illness worldwide, this could potentially mean light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
Continue reading Looking on the Bright Side of Clinical Depression
Be honest. We all have one. What’s your poison? Booze, tobacco, prescription drugs… or something a little more exotic? Cannabis is a controversial plant, regarded by many as a godsend. If Carlsberg made a ‘erb…
Continue reading Panacea Nostrum – The Forensic Toxicology of Cannabis
Prior to the discovery of nociceptors in 1906, scientists believed that animals were like mechanical devices that transformed the energy of sensory stimuli into motor responses. Pain is one of those stimulated reactions, but it is unlike other sensations. What is the purpose of pain?
Continue reading Ouch!! #$@*!! – We Take a Quick Look at the Neuro-Physics of Pain
Everything is connected. And so it is in the human body too. Everything in the human body is connected. No doubt that all your organs – heart, liver, lungs – work as one to keep you alive and as close as possible to a healthy state.
Continue reading We Consider Human Network Physiology and Medicine – The “Body Electric” – Part Deux
The World population has grown to 7 billion, and it is expected to reach over 9 billion by 2050. In the long-term, this growth is unsustainable, as vital resources are becoming increasingly depleted and humanity faces a number of threats to its continued expansion. Many believe that scientists will solve these problems with new technology. Are humans causing the sixth mass extinction? What is the reality?
Continue reading In the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction…
There is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms. From an all-physical point of view, the former tend to be so much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. At MIT, Jeremy England derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity.
Continue reading A Theory of Life… The Physics of Cells and Macroscopic Irreversibility
Once a chic resort on the Bay of Naples, Herculaneum was favoured by the finest of Roman’s elite society, who spent the hot Italian summers there… until a catastrophe struck one afternoon in 79 AD. The Villa dei Papiri, excavated centuries later, was found to contain the only library to have survived from the Classical World – a unique cultural treasure, which the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly destroyed, and yet preserved all at once. How do you read what is essentially a charred book?
Continue reading Between the Lines of the Herculaneum Papyri using X-Ray Imaging Techniques
Plant life is one of Nature’s miracles. Imagine being a plant and almost all you will ever need to keep on striving is sheer sunlight. In green plants, both photosynthesis and aerobic respiration occur. It’s a lot like the way in which the human body breaks down food into fuel that it can store. Essentially, using energy from the Sun, a plant can transform carbon dioxide CO2 and water into glucose and oxygen…
Continue reading A Day in the Life of a Plant – Photosynthesis and Phytochemistry