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No less than Charles Darwin, the father of evolution by natural selection, speculated a century and a half ago that birdsong might be among the many evolutionary precursors to human language. Turns out
The James Webb space telescope was launched with much fanfare on Christmas Eve to take up station a million miles from Earth, where the gravitational forces of the sun, Earth and moon acting
According to the brilliant Cambridge physicist and mathematician Paul Dirac, Albert Einstein was the most brilliant physicist of the 20th century, and possibly all time. But even Einstein could be stubbornly, even spectacularly
Last August as the number of COVID cases wound down in the U.S. and Canada, many felt the worst was over. After all, the numbers were falling and many were now vaccinated, especially in
Sometimes we are so busy we barely have time to think. Here’s what one very busy day looked like – then guess who and when: Breakfast at 5 a.m. with fried eggs and bacon.
In biology, structure dictates function. That’s certainly the case with protein-encoding genes: the sequence of bases in a specific gene dictates the sequence of bases in an intermediate molecule called messenger RNA, which in
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Evidence from Israel last year suggested the immunity to the COVID virus created by two shots of a mRNA vaccine might begin to wane as early as three to four months following the second shot.
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The scene was surreal on Dec. 30: just a few blocks from the Niagara Long-Term Care Residence where my wife resides, streets and stores were crowded with shoppers inside and outside lined up, most with masks
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Where SARS-Cov-2 is concerned, surprise is the operative word. As recently as last summer some experts began to imagine a world beyond COVID or at least a world where COVID was corralled well
If all goes well, the most powerful, capable, expensive and complex star-gazing satellite telescope yet – the James Webb telescope – is slated for launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket later this month. It’s been
Remember this time a year ago, all was relatively quiet several months following the opening first surge of COVID-19 in the winter and spring of 2020. That early days surge seemed to affect mostly
Next episode in NOTL library's online Nobel series is Monday, Nov. 22 For Frances Arnold, the question was how to design a better enzyme to break up plastic or perhaps create new drugs? Frustrated
Of the three Nobel prizes in science awarded each year, my hands-down favorite is physics. Physics covers the really big stuff, such as the origins of the universe, the life cycles of galaxies,
Without our senses, our bodies and brains would be unable to make sense of what’s going on outside and within our bodies. Those senses depend on billions of sensors (receptors) and their related
The headline might sound esoteric, but the subject is not. The planet is awash with plastic, thrown every which way from car windows, piled up in dumpsites or cluttering the bottoms of rivers, seas and oceans
This year’s Nobel Prize in physics represents a timely change. No black holes, gravitational waves or birth of the universe, no laser tweezers and no new particles accompanied by inflationary claims that without this
In 1953, a Nobel Prize was awarded to James Watson and Francis Crick for their model of DNA whose double-stranded helical structure hinted at how genes might be faithfully passed on from one
It wasn’t so long ago that some were upset by women wearing the niqab. Now, nearly two years into this pandemic, distancing, social bubbles and face masks have become the norm and the niqab is
Like Oliver Sachs, I eagerly look forward to the weekly arrival of the next issue of the journal Nature. Last week a piece written by Paul Nurse caught my eye. He quoted his
Sometimes, a rare disease can teach us a lot about treating more common diseases. Such is the case for a disease called transthyretin amyloidosis, which in its autosomal dominantly transmitted form, is rare
For most of us who have been sweltering in Ontario’s summer heat wave, the latest surge in infections in Israel seems too far away to worry. But Israel may be the canary in the mine
Unlike simple cells such as archaea and bacteria, viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID) are unable to make copies of themselves without host cells to exploit. Like most viruses, SARS-CoV-2 is a
No one knows when storytelling began but it would have required symbolic thought and language and the cognitive ability to imagine and literally “talk about” the past, present and future. Modern humans were probably not
At the most basic level, this pandemic has always been about a battle between hordes of mutating viruses and billions of human hosts, with no clear victor or end as yet in sight.
When I was a medical student, the dean of Medicine at Western University presented the history of a young man who had a malignant melanoma with metastases to his liver (based on a laparoscopic
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