Virophages – are they our friends or our foes?
By Dragana Catici, University of Bath
Did you know that, just like us, other viruses can get infected with viruses too? Viruses have always challenged our views of life. These small obligate parasites, with sizes ranging from 20–400 nm, have been the cause of much pain and death throughout the history of life on Earth.
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Science Communication Competition video winner – Communicating Science through Art
By Jirayu “Boo Boo” Tanprasertsuk, Ph.D. candidate in Biochemical and Molecular Nutrition, Tufts University
Jirayu was the winner of the 2018 Biochemical Society Science Communication Competition (video category). Here Jirayu explores some of his inspirations in creating his video. You can see his winning entry, “Eating for your eyes”, here. The winning written article, by Victoria Bolton, is published in the August 2018 issue of The Biochemist magazine, which you can find here.
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Science and the Industrial Strategy – Parliamentary Links Day 2018
By Carmen Coxon, National Institute for Biological Standards and Control
Scientists and politicians both have a tendency to over promise (usually with the best of intentions!) and under deliver (life never really works out how you expect, right?). By the end of the 30th Parliamentary Links Day I also got the impression we share something else – a desire to ensure that UK science remains at the top of its game and that the UK scientific research community is well supported.
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Approaching the Singularity; have we crossed the event horizon of Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
By Peter Wotherspoon, Biochemical Society
Okay, so we all know how this song and dance goes; it’s been in enough movies by this point. Here we have (under slightly more violent circumstances than would be ideal) what is generally thought of as the technological singularity. The idea that the creation of artificial super-intelligence will lead to an unstoppable cascade of technological advancements because no doubt a computer intelligence smarter than us can in turn make another computer intelligence smarter than it and so on. So, with all the hype around AI recently, have we reached the tipping point?
