Based on the success of House of Cards and other political dramas, it’s no secret: humans love their politics. But is it for the birds as well? In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers at the University of Vienna have found that ravens play politics too.Ravens are social creatures, travelling in flocks with...

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We have all heard that ‘breast is best’, for a variety of reasons. It provides infants with an ideal source of nutrition, and breast-fed babies have fewer cases of illness than their formula-fed counterparts. Benefits extend to the mother as well; breast feeding helps reduce risk of post partum depression, aids in uterine contraction, helps mothers...

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Dr. Kelly Suschinsky  Photo credit: Eric Brousseau Let’s talk about sex. That’s what Dr. Kelly Suschinsky, a post-doc researcher at Queens University in the SageLab has been doing since 2005, when she began researching human sexual arousal."Because sexuality can be such an important component of people’s lives, it is crucial to better understand various aspects of...

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The idea first arose in the mid-eighties. Imagine what we could do if we knew what it looked like? We could understand where we came from. What makes us tick. What makes us sick. We could revolutionize the field of medicine. Forensic science. Biotechnology. Anthropology.  Therein began the quest to sequence the human genome.  DNA...

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 I won’t forget the phone call. At the time, my brother, sister and I were engaged in an epic battle of monopoly. My mum answered the ringing phone, and when we heard the heart-wrenching sobs, we realized something was terribly wrong. I was too young to know what a cervix was, but I did know...

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Who is this little critter, and why is he so happy? Taken by shakily holding my camera phone up to the viewing lens, at a total of 100x magnification. This is Hymenolepis diminuta, the rat tapeworm. It doesn't look much like a tapeworm just yet, because it's in an intermediate stage of development, called a...

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To my loyal readers (hi mom!), I have a few changes to announce. I have returned to what researchers call 'the bench'. It's been 15 months. One media internship and one maternity leave later, I'm back in the lab. I had two goals during my maternity leave: publish my first research article from my PhD work,...

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 When it was discovered that adopted 3 year old twin girls Binh and Phuoc had a potentially fatal genetic disorder, Michael Wagner did what any father would do: he donated a portion of his liver to his child.  Unfortunately, there was only enough tissue for one of his daughters, and their mother was not a...

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The MMR vaccine causes Autism. Barack Obama was not born on American soil. Man-made climate change is a fallacy and while we’re at it, the moon landing wasn’t real either.There’s a psychological phenomena as to why people may hold onto such beliefs in the face of indisputable evidence.  When we have a strong belief, we...

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I am a woman in science. Most of the times, the ‘woman’ part is a non-issue. But sometimes, it is.“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they...

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