Category: Science Shoutout

Among the deadliest diseases worldwide is diabetes. Despite the exhausting public health campaigns designed to raise awareness of the fatal complications that develop within one year of untreated diabetes, one in ten people around the world suffer from it. The “hidden” sugar is added to virtually every soda, not to mention the abundance of sweets in our everyday diet. Kids as young as two years old are exposed to such high sugar food in every social encounter and there’s no way to protect them from it, even if we want to. The fact that so many of us have become accustomed to the taste of sugar is scary if not alarming already and is starting to cost us not only money, but lives. Lives of so many lost over a little 6 carbon ring molecule.

However, not all of it is our fault. According to their literature, even the ancient Greeks and Egyptians noticed a sweet taste of their urine. The term diabetes was first used over 2000 years ago and the first medical texts describing it appear in 1425 in Britain. The diabetes mellitus they talked about is, as we call it today, of type 1. The onset of the type 1 diabetes is usually already in childhood, due to genetics and congenital pancreatic insufficiency. With the modern world came the type 2 – caused by the overconsumption of sugar and carbohydrates, usually starting later in the adult life. The difference is – in type 1 diabetes pancreatic cells produce very little or no insulin due to the organ dysfunction, whereas in type 2 it’s either all other cells in our body stop recognizing the insulin our pancreas produces and become blind to it in a way, or the pancreas stops producing the insulin because of the exhaustion caused by constant high blood sugar levels.

Ah, the never-ending cycle of continuous working, feeling you haven’t done enough and then binging on YouTube self-improvement videos hoping to start fresh tomorrow… or on Monday… or, well, at least next year. We have all been there and we have all done that. The amount of money those self-help videos and books make is even more ridiculous when you realize how toxic they can get. However, among the noise there is legit advice and a few methods that have been proven to work and are even applied in school curriculums for children suffering from attention deficits. One of them, the most popular one for sure, is the Pomodoro method.

Have you ever wondered what it is exactly that scientists do? Why they decide to become scientists and what obstacles they have on their journey? In short, how they got where they are today. These and many more are the questions that any young person interested in pursuing a career in science has running around in their head. It’s a common misconception that scientists function on a vastly different level than the average person and a wonderful cognition that even high school students have quite a bit in common with scientists.

Some of the most interesting, yet often limited clinical evidence comes from so called case studies. A case study offers a unique and thorough view of the disease in question, especially of how it affects one specific individual. Although intriguing, a case study can’t be considered reliable proof for forming or changing clinical guidelines or practices, due to its lack of statistical significance, or statistics in general. You see, big clinical studies, for example, are designed to predict how the majority would react to a certain drug, leaving the rare ones marginalized. Case studies, on the other hand, are meant exactly for the ones that “don’t fit in”, but also for the ones that are simply so rare it’s impossible to draw statistically supported conclusions. It’s the rare ones that bring case studies to the spotlight, and they make great teaching material for both professors and students.

If you have ever sat in a science class, you might be familiar with the classic science-teacher opening to an introductory lesson on a new topic. Quite typically, you are not given an immediate outline of the new concepts, but rather briefed on how and why we came to know them in the first place. If you are to study the classical law of universal gravitation, you first need to know the story of how an apple supposedly decided to study the crown of Isaac Newton’s head. You might think this is somewhat silly. Why turn a physics lecture into a history class? Well, there is a reason for this trend, and it is not to fill time.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

When you think about the world we live in, you most likely feel like it’s getting worse by the day – there is an increasing number of terrorist attacks, education is absent in many parts of the world, many people don’t have access to healthcare or live in extreme poverty, to mention just a few. You may, therefore, be surprised to hear that all the major indicators actually show that the world has been getting consistently better in virtually all aspects for the last few decades! The question, therefore, arises as to why so many of us share such a distorted, negative perception of the world, and what we can do to align it with reality?

People often ask, “What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?” A flip answer would be, “The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!”

Jared Diamond

Sir Roger Penrose is one of those names in science you may see so often that you might just think it’s an adjective, especially if your interests happen to be particularly well aligned with his. Penrose’s name crops up in cosmology, quantum mechanics, various mathematical fields and even in philosophy and graphic art. He is also one of this year’s Nobel Prize laureates in physics, which is why his name has been showing up even more frequently than usual. Since his is a name and character worth remembering, we’re bringing you a short overview of his most important endeavors and contributions.