Whilst I was laid up with COVID* I got to wondering about the number of folk the virus passed through during its journey from a bat in Wuhan to me in Yorkshire. A quick Fermi estimate suggested something rather surprising: Assuming it takes 5 days, on average, from infection to…

You don’t need a PhD in horology to know that there are piles of great popular science books out there and not enough time to read them all. …

Chemistry built the modern world, from the materials that make up the everyday objects around us, the batteries in our devices and cleaning products that help to maintain sanitation. All this and much more besides are examples of chemistry in everyday life. To illustrate this and have a bit of…

Children are always going to find cunning ways to bunk off school, and the latest trick is to fake a positive COVID-19 lateral flow test (LFT) using soft drinks. So how are fruit juices, cola and devious kids fooling the tests and is there a way to tell a fake positive result from a real one? I’ve tried to find out. First, I thought it best to check the claims, so I cracked open bottles of cola and orange juice, then deposited a few drops directly onto LFTs. Sure enough, a few minutes later, two lines appeared on each test, supposedly indicating the presence of the virus that causes COVID-19.

Transitioning to home working had its challenges for us all, but when your job involves researching biological applications for nanotechnology, those trials are a little more complicated than juggling the household’s broadband usage. …

For most of the 20th century, more than 60,000 people died in the US from polio, diphtheria and small pox each year. In 2016, the American death toll from these diseases was zero. Around the globe, two to three million deaths from these diseases and others, including measles, rubella and…

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‘Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind’ I came across that quote (from the zoologist Marston Bates) during a particularly low period in my research career, nothing seemed to be working. The days of failed experiments stretched into weeks and then months, with…

Just how long is all of your DNA? Let’s start with a quick recap. The sequence of Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), is famously spelt out in just 4 letters — A T G and C. Each letter represent the repeating ‘bases’; adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. And the famous DNA double…