Sam Talks About...

You may have wondered, why can't humans see in the dark, or could we learn to see radiowaves etc. the short answer to why we don't have these sensory systems is because of the evolutionary cost compared with the very small amount of gain, if any. It would be incredibly energy and time consuming to evolve good enough night vision when we can just go to sleep at night and see during the day. So far our senses have served us well, but what if we could give ourselves new senses with the aid of technology? After all, we can invent new technology much much faster than mother nature can invent X-ray vision eyeballs! Neuronal plasticity is the ability of neurones to change their connectivity with one another in order to gain new functions or to modify existing functions. This neural plasticity is essential for memory and learning and gives us the ability to perceive the world around us. By introducing a new input to the brain, you will trigger the process of neuronal plasticity as ...

When I was looking into becoming a medical writer, I was just at the end of my MSc and trying to decide whether to try and get a job in medical communications or to do a PhD and then move into Med Comms later. The short answer is no you don't necessarily need  a PhD to be a medical writer, but some employers think you do and it certainly seems to be the ideal.  After looking around on the internet I found a few forum posts asking about the same thing, "should I do a PhD to get into Med Comms?”. Most people said no not necessarily. But as far as I could tell, all of them did have PhD’s and were just telling people well maybe yes and maybe no. Since getting a job as an associate medical writer without a PhD, I've heard a lot more of this conversation occurring within the industry and especially at careers fairs. A lot of people  do  have PhD’s and quite often post-doctoral experience. But that is normally because they started out in academia and...

A man named Francois Rautenbach has recently become the owner of an Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) from the Apollo missions. The type of computer he has was the first computer that was launched into space as part of the Apollo missions and Rautenbach argues that this was the first computer computer to ever use integrated circuits, or microchips (as opposed to mainframe computers with big paper tapes) and the first computer to have re-programmable software. To be clear the exact computers in the videos below appear to be a test AGC with no memory modules - that may have been used to develop the software that eventually sent man to the Moon - along with the actual memory modules used in the first test flight of the guidance computer system in a rocket, flight AS-202. Both the development computer and the memory modules paved the way for the eventual moon landing in Apollo 11. You'd be forgiven for thinking that something like this would be stored in a museum somewhere; but no, it ...

The recent publication of a clinical trial for a drug (Aducanumab) being developed to treat Alzheimer's disease has hit the mainstream media big time. In all of this commotion, especially when the reporting may not have been written by someone familiar with the field, it can be easy for people to get swept away by the huge media buzz and feel like "this is it! the new wonder drug everyone has been waiting for is finally here!"  Except that's not quite the case, as it rarely ever is when a scientific story hits the news. Whether its the BBC, online science blogs or your tabloid newspaper of preference, all of these news outlets are competing for your attention and are striving to be the first to break the story.  I won't go through the study myself, because I'm about to point you to two excellent sources that have already done a brilliant job of it, but there are a few things I want people to clearly see: This is quite an early study and the failur...