In 1963, Dr. Sydney Brenner, a South African biologist, went looking for a model organism to advance the study of biological development, specifically targeting the nervous system. What he found was Caenorhabditis elegans, or C. elegans for short. C. elegans is a...
Many rodents are nocturnal. However, even rodents that are active during the day tend to prefer darker areas. Most rats, for example, have adapted to be accustomed to spending daylight hours largely sheltered from light sources. This makes lighting control in habitats...
“Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.” – Kevin Kelly Living creatures are almost incomprehensibly complex. Take the human body, which is made up of trillions of cells creating...
One of the classic images of pediatric medicine in the United States is the image of a physician giving a vaccination shot. Like many other classic images of twentieth-century life in the US, this one is unsurprisingly immortalized in a Norman Rockwell painting....
For thousands of years, humans have struggled against infectious diseases transmitted by mosquitos. Records describing the symptoms of malaria can be traced back to 2700 B.C. in China. Other mosquito-borne diseases, such as yellow fever, dengue, and West Nile virus...
Last week, the New York Times reported that two-thirds of the world is facing severe water shortages at least once a year. A large chunk of the affected population is in India and China, but areas of the United States like Texas, Florida, and California are included...
