Could llamas hold the key to curing Covid-19?
If this works out, the llama may pip the unicorn to the title of Most Magical Animal. As you will have heard a thousand times before, mostly on morning news shows, Covid-19 has all of us navigating through ‘unprecedented times’. Social distancing regulations may be easing worldwide, but getting back to living the...
Current in Science
SpaceX and NASA successfully launch Dragon Capsule
It’s the first time NASA has launched astronauts since 2011, and could usher in a new age of commercial and government space innovation. Amidst all of the memes and baby names, I sometimes forget that Elon Musk is an actual billionaire with a huge, privately owned space tech company....
The ‘Doomsday Vault’ preserving agricultural biodiversity
This Norwegian vault holds nearly one million preserved seeds from all across the world, just in case they’re needed in the future. When I first played Bethesda’s Fallout video game series, in which you are thrown into a giant vault underground and then eventually released hundreds of years later,...
People are experiencing strange dreams en mass during lockdown
Disturbed sleeping patterns and heightened anxiety induced by the current crisis has led to a sharp increase in vivid and unusual dreams, though experts claim it's no cause for concern. Since we began isolating all those weeks ago, you've probably been having some pretty strange dreams. While you're definitely not...
Malaria cure possible with new microbe
Scientists in Kenya have discovered a microbe they say can prevent mosquitoes from spreading malaria. Malaria is currently one of the leading causes of mortality in the world. More than 400,000 people are killed by the disease each year, and most of these victims are...
MIT are ‘hacking’ into people’s dreams
The highly experimental Dream Lab at MIT is working on a ‘dream manipulation’ device. And the best part? The build instructions are available online. We spend a third of our life asleep and dreaming. Ancient civilisations used to believe that dreams were messages from the Gods, whilst the Greeks...
Sea sensors to change the world in 2020?
Researchers are looking to deploy 50,000 ocean sensors to track ships, storms, wildlife, and weather in 2020. With Musk’s 60 Starlink satellites already filling the sky, oceanographers are now looking to build an interconnected network of sea sensors spanning an area larger than Texas. As we sit here today it’s feasible to suggest that we probably know less about the high seas than we do the moon, but tech tycoon John...
Is the Coronavirus decreasing global air pollution?
It’s hard to find a silver lining to a global pandemic, but this just might be one. If you weren’t concerned by the spread of COVID-19 earlier this month, you sure are now. Having escalated from an epidemic to a pandemic seemingly overnight, the coronavirus now has government officials scrambling worldwide to contain the virus and to protect their respective citizens and economies. But while COVID-19 represents one of the greatest threats to...
Newly discovered ‘Super-Earth’ planet could inhabit life
A nearby exoplanet called K2-18b has been analysed by astrophysicists and could be host to life, despite being far bigger than Earth. The idea of other life forms being somewhere out there in the vast, slightly terrifying abyss of space has been discussed for centuries, but we’ve still yet to find anything concrete that proves we aren’t alone in the universe. There’s reason enough to be a little more hopeful...
Does Netflix have a pseudoscience problem?
Gwyneth Paltrow’s The Goop Lab is just the tip of the iceberg. A laboratory is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific research and experiments may be performed. Shockingly, Gwyneth Paltrow and her posse spend zero time in laboratories for the duration of their new Netflix show The Goop Lab as there’s no actual science taking place. And, if we’re honest, there’s nothing particularly ‘controlled’ about a bunch of privileged white women...
