For so many of us, the essence of happiness lies in the taste of a piece of good chocolate. However, my friend doesn’t much care for it. Could such almost criminal dislike of chocolate be explained by genetics? Indeed, scientists have been puzzled by the origin of complex human traits ranging from personal behavior to the occurrence of diseases since ...

As a researcher, a number of hours are dedicated to reading scientific journals. There are the cutting-edge papers you need go over to stay updated, the articles you must review, and of course your own thesis which you look through over and over until your brain shuts down. If you are a student, then there is the never-ending stream of ...

Last month, the already-innovative company Uber launched its first self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, USA. Goodbye sharing economy, hello robot-driven market. It joins companies such as Tesla, Google and Ford in the race for the ultimate autonomous car. The car that will not only calculate the shortest route to work, or control your cruising speed on the highway, but allow you ...

To explain the Sokolov effect, and why it has been mainly forgotten by society, we first have to understand the life of the man that gave it its name. Vasily Sokolov was born in 1884 in Minsk (current capital of Belarus). Son of Andrei Ilya Sokolov, bourgeois descent, and Maria Orlov, youngest daughter of an influential nobleman. He had a ...

On April 22, something truly remarkable happened. Scientists and non-scientists alike marched in protest in more than six hundred locations around the world, including Stockholm. Never before have the advocates of science been so united, and so public in their concern. What prompted this extraordinary event? Story by: Matthijs Dorst The troubled history of Science Let’s take a step back. ...

Story by: Joanna Kritikou Remember the ice bucket challenge? It actually directly funded a major breakthrough in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) research. Whole-exome analyses of 1,022 familial ALS (FALS) cases and 7,315 controls were conducted, making it the largest ever study of genetically inherited ALS. Researchers identified a significant association between loss-of-function NEK1 variants and FALS risk. Even though NEK1 ...

The Wall Street Journal reported last March that Elon Musk is backing up a neuroscience tech called Neuralink that has the modest aim to enhance the human brain by connecting it to a computer. The Silicon Valley billionaire and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has been discussing the “neural lace” concept since 2016 as means to make humans keep pace ...

Scientists do science. Artists make art. Writers write. Right? You cannot get scientific credit without the long slog through a lengthy education, and dodging the daily struggles of academia. Or can you? What happens when contributions come from an “outsider”? What makes a scientist? And who decides? Story by: Caitrin Crudden In the 17th century, our view of the world ...

In the 1960s Summer Olympic Games in Rome, Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen collapsed during a road race and died of an alleged overdose of amphetamines and a vasodilator that he took as performance enhancers. The case raised an international discussion that swelled into the very first doping scandal. The war on doping had officially begun. Story By; Marianna Tampere ...

SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) is a company that develops space rockets to send payloads, containing cargo or passengers, into space. SpaceX’s ultimate vision is to give people the opportunity to live on other planets, with Mars as the first goal. The company is currently working to land a spacecraft on Mars as early as 2018. Story By: Patrick Bjärterot ...