31 March 2011
Even though the environment around us is continually changing, our bodies need to maintain a constant internal environment if they’re to work properly. This process of regulation is called homeostasis.
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10 March 2011
It may surprise you to learn that the term ‘carrying capacity’ actually has nothing to do with how much shopping you can lug home from Tesco. Instead, it refers to the number of organisms any given ecosystem can support. The carrying capacity of a rainforest, for instance, is considerably greater than that of, say, a desert.
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8 March 2011
Catapulted into the limelight following the launch of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), hadrons are particles found in the nucleus of atoms.
Tags: Humanities, Inside Story, Science from Scratch
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18 February 2011
Despite being a contradiction in terms, the phrase ‘living fossil’ is commonly used by biologists to describe some of the most fascinating products of evolution.
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28 January 2011
The term ‘quantum’ generally refers to a discrete amount of a specific physical quantity, such as energy or momentum. However, this term also refers to anything that operates using quantum mechanics – the laws governing the smallest particles, such as photons, electrons and the Higgs boson, which differ from ‘classical’ or Newtonian laws. So, a ‘quantum computer’ is a computer that works using quantum mechanics.
Tags: Science from Scratch
Posted in College, Students | 1 Comment »
16 December 2010
Chromosomes are long structures of DNA wrapped tightly around a chain of bead-like proteins called histones. The term ‘chromosome’ was coined when scientists first noticed that these structures can be strongly stained with some dyes used in the lab.
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22 November 2010
The word zygote originates from the Greek word zugoun, meaning to yoke or to join. The zygote is produced when the male’s sperm cell fuses and fertilises the female’s egg cell, forming a cell carrying genetic information from both parents.
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14 October 2010
Not just a cool refreshing beer to solar astronomers, the corona is better known as the super-heated outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere.
Made of plasma almost 200 times hotter than the surface (or photosphere) of the Sun, the corona is so sparse in comparison, that it only produce one-millionth of the light. What makes the corona so scorching is still under debate, but it is most likely to be related to the Sun’s magnetic field. Solar magnetism is certainly the cause of coronal loops – beautiful arches of magnetised material that can be seen using powerful telescopes. These loops are often the precursors to coronal mass ejections – massive bursts of solar wind that extend millions of kilometres into space. The best time to see the corona is during a total solar eclipse, when its ghostly form can be seen without the use of a telescope. Many other stars also have coronae, some even more luminous than the Sun’s.
— Sarah Barker, MSc Science Communication
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17 September 2010
“Mutation? No, I’m not talking about X-Men. Whilst the comic does take its theory from a scientific principle, I’m sorry to say the chances of mutations granting you super powers are slim.
Mutations are permanent changes to our DNA sequence and happen every time a cell replicates. They can be inherited from parents, or occur in somatic cells (anything that’s not an egg or a sperm) due to the environment – a bite from a radioactive spider or a mistake when DNA is copied during cell division, for example. Usually, mutations occur in sections of DNA that don’t affect essential bodily functions but, very occasionally, a mutation crops up in an important gene and leads to conditions like cancer and Down’s syndrome, or the next evolutionary step of a species.”
—Naomi Thorne, Biology postgraduate
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7 September 2010
Last month four members of the Department of Physics – Dr David Clements, Professor Andrew Jaffe, Dr Roberto Trotta and Dr Amanda Chatten exhibited at the Venice Architectural Biennale. Dave Clements (Physics) reports on the unique experience:
Tags: Faculty of Natural Sciences, Physics, Science from Scratch
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26 July 2010
Entropy comes from a Greek word meaning ‘transformation’.
In 1850 entropy was defined as ‘energy gone to waste’ and this definition has evolved over time. Entropy is now more commonly thought of as how much energy is dispersed during a process. Think of a burning log fire; as the logs burn, heat and light energy are lost to the surroundings. This means that the entropy of the ‘system’ of the burning fire is increasing. Entropy also has links with cosmology. The entropy of the universe is generally thought to be increasing, giving rise to speculation that the energy dispersed as heat could contribute to the end of the universe, known as ‘heat death’.
— Anne Coleman, Msc Science Communications
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28 June 2010
The term ‘pheno’ derives from the Greek word for display. Phenotype is a term which describes the observable traits of an organism, like size, shape or colour. The colour of our eyes is a phenotype which is strongly controlled by our genetic makeup. However, a phenotype is not only down to an organism’s genetics but can be due to its interaction with the environ
ment where it lives, or the result of interactions between its genetics and its environment, so that as the environment changes the phenotype of an organism also alters.
For example, some plants can change their leaf thickness in response to stress caused by environmental factors such as lack of water. The term phenotype was first coined by Danish scientist Wilhelm Johannsen after his work on Phaseolus Vulgaris, or princess beans, showed that genetically identical beans had different weights. He concluded that the appearance of a trait is not totally dependent on genetic make-up, which explains why identical twins can grow up to behave and even look different.
—Natalie Mills, MSc Science Communication
Tags: Issue 221, Science from Scratch
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28 May 2010
A chimera in genetics is an organism which carries more than one set of DNA. A chimera can be naturally born, artificially made, or can even be someone who has had an organ transplant.
Tags: Issue 220, Science from Scratch
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19 May 2010
Not to be confused with the cult science fiction comedy show, red dwarfs are relatively small and cool stars. They are the most popular type of star in the galaxy and the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is a red dwarf star.
Tags: Issue 219, Science from Scratch
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28 April 2010
Red giant stars are big, bright stars edging towards their final days. Most stars spend the best part of their lives fusing hydrogen into helium in what is called the ‘main sequence stage’. This is what the Sun is doing now, but when stars like the Sun exhaust the hydrogen supplies at their core, nuclear reactions stop and the core contracts under gravity.
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