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 ...

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...

This is a long standing request that I have been waiting to do, although I wasn't quite sure I had that much to say about it at first. But before we get to why the sea is salty now and how salt is left behind when water evaporates, lets talk about how all that salt got into the sea in the first place. Better yet, how did we even get seas for there to be so much salt in anyway? Cast your mind back say 3.5 billion years, give or take, when the world was just forming into a huge molten rock. In those days,  Earth's early atmosphere contained a lot of hydrogen and probably quite a lot of water vapour too, as oxygen and hydrogen bond readily to form water. But, as the earth was a giant volcanic molten mess at the time, the surface and atmosphere were far too hot for liquid water. As you may know, boiling points are subject to conditions such as pressure (that's why rapid boiling tubes use a high pressure, like in a coffee machine) but also the composition of the atmosphere, wh...

You probably never really thought about this before, and neither had I really until I read about it about a month ago. But it turns out that your eyes are pretty much the least important player in vision. You might be pretty sceptical at this point, so I want you to close your eyes and imagine a boat. Done it? Okay, good, you just saw something without using your eyes! At this point, you're probably wondering where I'm going with this. ell I'm about to show you how much work has to be put in to be able to see something properly and hopefully you'll realise just how impressive the machinery  in-between your ears really is. First, let's start with how we can go from an array of photoreceptors in the retina to a complex image of the world around us in 3D. First you have the two types of photoreceptors in the primary visual system; rod cells can detect low level light but they do not give very good acuity and they do not give colour vision, cone cells can detect colo...

The ability to identify and control individual brain cells (neurones) has generated huge interest in recent years, it's made for some startling discoveries and some incredible images (like the one below). But we're really only beginning to scratch the surface of the potential these technologies hold, and the techniques here are quite controversial.  This is a real image of individual neurones and the connections they make, all with individual colourings  The actual methods for controlling individual neurones require a lot of complex genetic manipulation, but the general concepts are easier to get to grasps with. The main method used for the genetic manipulation of animal genomes is the cre-lox system. I won't go into the details (you can read a great review by its inventor here ) but this technique allows scientists to insert or remove any gene you want, in any cell, even at specific times (when the cells are still growing or mature for example).  The next ques...

You may be aware of the current “replication crisis” in science at the moment. If you aren’t, over the last decade human and biological sciences (psychology in particular) have seen a dramatic increase in the number of papers that are either poorly executed, are not successfully replicated, or are not replicated at all. It has been estimated that these irreproducible studies  waste $28 billion in the US alone.  There are many reasons why these poor studies are conducted and published. Job performance is a major issue, as the value of an academic is measured by the number of publications they write and the grant money they are able to bring in for their institute. Many believe that this has led to a drop in the overall quality of manuscripts being published, as more and more researchers feel the pressure to publish positive results in order to progress in their careers or even keep their job at all. This means that negative results are rarely published and few...

Many of us have terrible sleeping patterns, often as a result of staying up late for assignments, parties or just not realising it’s so late. This may have been especially true throughout fresher’s week and the first few weeks of lectures at university. It can be very easy to get into this habit, and it only takes a couple of late nights in a row to really throw your body clock out of touch with the rest of the world! This is a problem that is very concerning to those who are aware, however very few people are aware of the current lack of sleep being attained by many adolescents. To be clear, I refer to adolescents as those who have started/ gone through puberty but are not yet full adults (i.e. 14-21 year olds). One often cited study found that over 45% of adolescents in the USA have inadequate sleep (less than the recommended 8.5-9.5h per day on a regular basis). This lead to 15-52% of students reporting excessive sleepiness, frequent daytime sleepiness, oversleeping and sle...