In Our Own Words

Jim's Presentation at the MIC

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Published on Thursday, 09 May 2013

You can download Jim's slides from the Master Investor Conference here.

Upcoming Science Festival in the UK

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Published on Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Readers who are in the UK or planning to be in the UK should not miss a chance to attend a new science festival being held in London, Oxford and Cambridge. The festival will run from 14 to 16 May at various  pubs, hence the festival has been named "Pint of Science."

Here is the link to the festival website: http://www.pintofscience.com/

Human Evolution Is Intertwined With The Bacteria That Lives In And On Us

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Published on Tuesday, 15 January 2013

There is a great article in The New Scientist's 14 January 2013 edition. The article makes the convincing argument that the human genome and human evolution cannot be viewed in isolation of the variety of bacteria that symbiotically co-exist in and on our bodies, referred to as our microbiome. The combined genomes (human and microbiome) have been dubbed "hologenomes".

The human body outsources essential functions to the microbiome, in the same way that a company outsources certain business processes to a third party. The company relies on the outsourced parties to thrive as a whole in the same way that humans rely on their microbiome.

This all raises new questions about the definition a

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Has New York's Mayor Bloomberg Gone Too Far This Time?

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Published on Friday, 24 August 2012

There was an interesting article in the New Yorker magazine (Click here for the full article) about Mayor Bloomberg's recent law restricting the size of sodas (that's fizzy drinks to us Brits) that vendors are allowed to sell. Being small government liberals, this type of legislation goes against the fabric of laissez-faire democracies and yet we tend to support it.

Whilst there are some parallels that can be drawn with the smoking ban that was introduced in New York back in 2003, they are very different issues. They are similar in that both smoking and drinking too many sodas almost always lead to health problems down the road. These health problems end up burdening the healthcare system

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NASA Proves It Still Has The Right Stuff

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Published on Wednesday, 15 August 2012

One giant leap for robotics. The landing of NASA's latest Mars Rover, Curiosity, is the most sophisticated mission yet. There were so many things that could have gone wrong (as with past missions), but this time, the voyage to Mars and the landing went off without a hitch. It was amazing to watch the simulation of the complex landing procedure. If you haven't seen it already, it's a must watch:

Decoding DNA - Getting to Know Yourself

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Published on Thursday, 31 May 2012

As non-molecular biologists, one of our objectives is to understand some of the key elements of this complex subject matter and to distill it to fellow non-molecular biologists in a more comprehensible and non-intimidating manner. So we thought we'd have a go at explaining the very fabric of our physical being, DNA. So here goes...

The human body is made up of around one hundred trillion cells (that’s 100,000,000,000,000). All of these cells, apart from 30 trillion or so mature red blood cells contain a nucleus, and in each nucleus resides our DNA. But what is DNA and why should we care about it?

The structure of DNA was first discovered almost 60 years ago by Watson & Crick, a

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