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If you live in the UK like me, you will probably come across advertisements from the ‘Keep Antibiotics Working’ campaign by Public Health England. The campaign has featured billboards, TV, radio and online adverts including the following infographic:

taken from http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/healthy-living/wellbeing/news/a29096/phe-antibiotics-campaign/

Antibiotic resistance occurs over time as bacteria adapt and reproduce. For example, if there is a population of bacteria in a human body, some of which have developed a mechanism of resistance to a certain antibiotic, these bacteria will survive and be able to reproduce inside someone treated with this antibiotic. While this process will happen naturally it is greatly accelerated by the overuse of antibiotics when they are not needed. A large contribution to overuse in the UK is the insistence of patients to request antibiotics from their GPs when they experience flu-like symptoms. According to this review from Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety, most infections that antibiotics…

Jeremy samples cultured beef without hesitation.

I have been following the technology behind lab-grown meat since I first saw an introductory article about it in The New Scientist as a teenager. In a nutshell, cultured meat is a form of cellular agriculture, producing meat from cell culture rather than by traditional livestock methods. The first step in growing cultured meat is to isolate animal cells that have a rapid rate of proliferation. While stem cells can be used for this, myoblasts are often favoured as they have already differentiated sufficiently and their proliferation rate, while lower, is high enough to be useful. These cells are placed in an appropriate growth medium and grown on a scaffold to promote a three dimensional structure.  A team of four scientists from the Netherlands headed by Mark Post created the world’s first burger made from cultured meat in 2013 from muscle strips derived from…

In the second part of my project, which I am now a couple of weeks into, I am exploring whether the innate turning preference of snails can be altered by training them to turn in a certain direction. To accomplish this, I have been given a group of inbred sinistral Lymnaea stagnalis raised in the lab, one of which has turned out to be a surprisingly majestic dancer.

These snails, like the famous Jeremy, also have reversed shells! Below is a photograph of one of the dextral snails from my first experiment and a sinistral snail from my second for comparison:

My new cohort of 23 lefty snails mostly got along fine in their new tanks with the exception of snail 11729 who hardly moved during initial observations and died shortly afterwards. We can only assume he has joined Jeremy in the sinistral snail afterlife.

To attempt to train the…

Behavioural handedness is a part of everyday life that you probably don’t put much thought into. Roughly 90% of the population is right handed and prefer using their right hand for most manual tasks. As with most things handedness is not completely black and white and some prefer to use their non-dominant hand for some activities. Personally the only left thing about me is my political leaning. My left hand is useless and I favour my right for every task I can think of. As is common to right-handers, I also have a tendency to turn right upon entering a new environment. I share this behavioural bias with snail number 11714.

My masters project utilizes the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis as a model organism to study the causes of behavioural handedness. This is a different species of snail to the famous Jeremy, although the snails I’m using for the second…

Like many people my age, I have fond memories of taking my daily vitamins as a child. The opportunity to eat a jelly sweet with a smiley face on it before breakfast was a welcome one, my favourite being Bassett’s soft and chewy in orange. It is still recommended by the NHS that children between the age of 6 months to 5 years should take supplements of vitamin A, C and D on a daily basis based on clinical evidence. The same recommendation however, is not made for adults. Despite the huge public interest in vitamin supplements (with an estimated public spend of £364 million in the UK each year), their supposed health benefits for the general public are somewhat dubious. While useful in some subgroups or for those with diagnosed deficiencies, many vitamin supplements consumed by the general public are at best a waste of money and at worst…