Science (Page 64)

Flouride is created by Wolf–Rayet stars, here seen in the Milky Way by the Hubble Space Telescope. Nasa/Judy Schmidt, CC BY-SA Look at the ingredients on a tube of toothpaste and you will probably read something like “contains sodium fluoride”. Fluoride, as you probably know, is important for healthy teeth. It strengthens enamel, the hard, protective layer around a tooth, and so helps prevent cavities. You may not think too deeply about toothpaste. But like all things on Earth, from the majestic to the mundane, fluoride – and the story of a smile – has a cosmic origin. Now, my colleagues and I have published a paper in Nature Astronomy that sheds some light on it. Virtually all natural elementsContinue Reading

Pixabay, CC BY-SA Fireworks can be a spectacular addition to many of our annual celebrations. But sadly they can cause serious distress to our pets. Many animals show an instinctive fear response to sudden and unexpected loud noises. The bangs, crackling and whistling sounds made by fireworks can be particularly terrifying, especially when displays last for more than a few minutes. Some pets will adapt and become used to them, but others can develop more deep-seated distress responses. One of my own dogs reacts badly, and this has become progressively worse as she has got older. With several festive celebrations potentially involving fireworks on the horizon, now is a good time to consider how best to help our pets remainContinue Reading

Nataliya Vaitkevich / Pexels It’s Halloween time, and the prospect of “trick-or-treating” and dressing up can be exciting for kids and adults alike. But for our dogs Halloween might be much less fun, and can actually be an extremely upsetting time. Just like us, all dogs are different and will react differently. But for many dogs, Halloween brings its own set of frights and potentially terrifying challenges. Sweets, chocolate, people wearing costumes, visitors to the door and the dark nights can all combine to make for a frightening and potentially dangerous time for our four-legged family members. But with a bit of care it’s not hard to help your dog have a safe and happy Halloween. Here are a fewContinue Reading

NicO_l/Shutterstock The UK is home to around 10.8 million owned pet cats. But the number of unowned cats living on the streets in the UK has remained largely unknown – until now. Our new research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, sheds some light on the size of this vulnerable feline group. We’ve estimated there are 247,429 unowned cats across all urban areas of the UK. Our figure is based on data collected from five urban towns and cities in the UK – Beeston, Bradford, Bulwell, Dunstable and Houghton Regis, and Everton – and then extrapolated. We chose these areas as we suspected they represented a spectrum of unowned cat density, including high density and low density areas. We usedContinue Reading

Yurchanka Siarhei/Shutterstock Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia affect more than 55 million people worldwide. But the development of effective treatments and cures is progressing slowly. To some extent, this is because we still don’t understand enough about what causes the disease and drives its progression. Myself and my colleagues’ most recent work, published in Science Advances, presents a new approach using ideas from other areas of science to analyse data from Alzheimer’s patients. In this way, we’ve been able to build a better understanding of the processes that control the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain. By way of background, in Alzheimer’s disease and many other neurodegenerative diseases, like Parkinson’s disease, proteins that are normally part ofContinue Reading

Fruit bats are the main animal host of the nipah virus BTS-BotrosTravelSolutions / Pixabay The severe and devastating consequences of the coronavirus pandemic were undoubtedly made worse by a substantial lack of pandemic preparedness, with the exception of East and South East Asia, which had built up defences after their experience with SARS in 2003. So it is crucial that governments begin to develop strategies to protect us if other deadly viruses emerge. A recent outbreak of Nipah virus in India has raised the question of whether we should start to consider it as a future threat, and look to build up our arsenal of defences now. The rapid development of vaccines against the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, have provided aContinue Reading

Flick through a news feed on your phone and you are likely to scroll across an article discussing the heated rivalries of the new space race. Forget the geopolitical struggles of a cold war. This time, it’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk versus Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: the two richest men in the world duking it out over whether SpaceX or Blue Origin, their respective companies, will be the dominant force in the new industry of private space flight. Occasionally, Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic gets a mention too, but the Brit being a relative pauper, and his space plane lacking the phallic majesty of his fellow billionaires’ rockets, he has received diminishing attention in recent weeks. The Musk v BezosContinue Reading