• Neuroscience and Cognition - Psychology

    Battling Addiction

    14/10/2023 - By 

    Addiction is a neurological disease that affects millions. How can we help them? From the desk of Dr. Teresa Franklin I earned my PhD in 1999 from Hahnemann University in Phila, PA, USA. Since then, I have worked mainly at the Center for the Studies of Addiction in the Department of Psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania, Phila, PA. USA. My research focus is addiction – specifically, the study of conditioned drug responses – otherwise known as drug cue-induced craving, which we can study now in real time with magnetic resonance imaging – MRI. Nowadays, most of us have had an…

  • Neuroscience and Cognition - Social science

    Unravelling Body image issues

    02/03/2022 - By 

    Negative body image. We have all been there. In this day of Instagram perfection, body dysmorphia has become an epidemic, as we struggle with the idea that our health and wealth and happiness is 100% dependent on what we look like. This is of course not a new phenomenon – each society has had its own idea of what is considered beautiful, and those who do not fit this norm internalize the idea that they are not enough. What are the psychological processes behind this? How does one develop a negative body image, that could then morph into something more…

  • Medicine

    Dry needling trigger points

    01/02/2022 - By 

    Pain treatment sometimes involves teasing apart trigger points. Everyone has knots in their muscles that are irritatingly painful. Sometimes these pains appear a ways away from the actual issue – referred pain. While such myofascial pain can be treated by exercise, or massage, a less known treatment is dry needling – insertion of a needle in the trigger point itself and “loosening” it. I spoke to my physiotherapist, Auke Ham, who is an expert in this technique at his clinic. In this interview, he speaks about how he diagnoses pain, how he uses needles to lessen it and how effective…

  • Evo/Devo

    On the observation of Evolution

    06/01/2022 - By 

    What does Evolution mean to you? When we talk about evolution, we think of the adaptation of a species to an external environment stresses. But what happens in the host/pathogen scenario, where two species are interacting with each other, and fighting for survival? How does this evolution actually work on the micro level, both on the sides of the host, as well as the pathogen as they wage war? Dr. Britt Koskella talks about the Red Queen hypothesis, specifically in the work that she is doing in phages and their interaction with their specific hosts to bring about co-evolutionary change…

  • Criminology - Psychology

    Violent Women

    07/08/2021 - By 

    Extremism and radicalization are the first steps to propagation of violence. When one thinks of a radicalized terrorist or active shooter, one stereotypically thinks of men, who seem to be more often perpetrators of mass violence. So when we read about female criminals, we are often surprised. Psychologists have been fascinated by the subject of violent women and what drives them. Is it rebellion? Is it the usual brainwashing that violence is the only way towards liberation? Is it feminism? I spoke to Dr. Maria Alvanou, who is a criminologist at the Neopolis University Pafos, about why and how women…

  • Ecology - Insect science - Microbiology

    The Animal Microbiome

    18/07/2021 - By 

    What are microbes doing for animals? We all contain multitudes [1], and the microbiome field has grown by leaps and bounds. Most work has been done in humans and other model animals such as mice, where conditions can be very well controlled in the lab. However animals also have their own microbiome, including those in the wild, as well as domesticated animals, which can have effects on ecology and agriculture. Dr. Sue Ishaq explains this further in her story of how she started working in the field of the microbiome, microbiology and genomics of animals, taking a few left turns…

  • Microbiology

    The Mysteries of the Phage

    24/04/2021 - By 

    The phage could save our future in health. A bacteriophage looks like the ultimate out-of-this-world structure, with a geometric head, attached to a tube, and ending in tail fibers that are essentially its landing gear. Watching a bacteriophage attach itself to its host bacteria is eerily reminiscent of a spaceship landing on a planet. The bacteriophage then pierces the surface of the cell, injects its genetic material into it, and proceeds to take over. While this might look like something out of a science fiction movie, the humble phage exists anywhere there are bacteria. This includes the gut, where researchers…

  • Social science

    The Science of Stigma

    28/02/2021 - By 

    Being stigmatized is the antithesis of feeling safe. The reality of living in society is there is always a possibility that a minority group of people might be labeled as “different” due to their status. This devaluing is called stigmatization. Stigmatization could be due to a certain characteristic or identity of condition, including sexual orientation, gender, race, religion or disease status. But what does that to do the marginalized? Unsurprisingly, social, institutionalized and internalized stigma can have adverse effects on the psychology and health of these people. Dr. Sarah Stutterheim studies the cause of stigmatization of HIV positive people, and…

  • Conservation - Ecology - Zoology

    On Sharks

    27/12/2020 - By 

    The wolf of the sea needs our help. When we think of sharks, we immediately conjure up images of villainous, scary creatures that can tear us apart limb from limb. Every megalomaniac in the movies has kept a pool full of sharks to liquidate their enemies. But what if you realize that sharks are actually in danger of dying out, and need our help to conserve their species as well as their habitats? I interviewed Melissa Marquez who studies sharks in their natural habitat, and she talks about how the public perspective about sharks needs to change, and what we…

  • Big Data - Medicine

    How CATs help machine learning diagnose disease

    07/11/2020 - By 

    CT scans and machine learning! Machine learning (ML) is everywhere, from your Netflix recommendations to a self-driving car. Also in medicine, ML can be used for many applications, including diagnosis of different diseases – here’s an earlier example that was featured about the brain tumors. Recently medical imaging has seen several algorithms outperforming, or performing on par with, human experts, see [1] for an overview.  To teach a ML algorithm to diagnose disease in a medical scan – for example, a magnetic resonance (MR) or a computed tomography (CT or CAT) scan, you need examples of scans with, and without,…