Grace Yeadon, Author at The Orbital

24Mar

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Features

Celebrating medical marvels

Medical documentaries are fascinating, informative and wide-reaching, but often toe a fine line between removing taboos around common conditions and reinforcing them. Programmes like 'Embarrassing Bodies' tread this line very carefully, encouraging public discussion around a wide variety of conditions and the removal of any associated embarrassment. There is no denying that increased awareness is a great thing and can only improve public health in general, but there is a danger of insensitively exhibiting patients to capitalise on natural viewer curiosity and provoke repulsion to keep viewing figures high. Being unwell is a stressful time for anybody and handling medical cases with care and delicacy should always take priority over providing entertainment, even if they waive their righ...

Astronomy: More than just pretty desktop backgrounds

21Mar

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Science & Technology

Astronomy: More than just pretty desktop backgrounds

The vast majority of us have looked up at the night sky before and admired the twinkling stars above or maybe noticed that the moon is looking particularly bright today. You may have taken a picture with a smart phone, a digital camera or been fortunate enough to have access to a telescope to have a closer look at what lies beyond our planet. But there is so much more to astronomy than pretty desktop backgrounds and astrological maps. I was kindly invited to the latest evening lecture hosted by the Department of Physics here at Royal Holloway where Professor Stewart Boogert demonstrated how much we can learn from the celestial bodies around us. To coincide with British Science Week and the return of BBC Stargazing Live, the talk explained how even a simple image of an object can tell yo...

17Mar

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Features

What’s the Deal With…tardigrades?

With a name meaning 'slow stepper', these eight-legged microorganisms might not sound very exciting. But tardigrades are arguably the toughest cookies in the animal kingdom and the most resilient creatures to have ever been discovered. First described in 1773, these unassuming creatures, only up to a millimetre in length, have been found all over the world, from hot springs, to Mount Everest, to the freezing conditions of Antarctica. Not many other animals have been proven to survive a few minutes of exposure to temperatures of 151°C and equally 'live to tell the tale' after a quick freeze at -272°C (colder than the average temperature on the surface of Pluto). And talking of extra-terrestrial conditions, tardigrades can even survive the vacuum of space for 10 days, when we wouldn't las...

17Feb

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Science & Technology

What’s the Deal With…Zealandia?

Continental drift has altered the surface of our planet for millions of years, giving rise to various conglomerations of crust like Laurasia and Gondwana, and the daddy of them all, Pangaea. Talk of alternative continents to the geological masses we recognise today has mostly been confined to looking backwards in time - until now. A paper by Mortimer et al. (2017) has offered the most evidence to date that another continent has been staring us in the face all these years. It is worth noting that whilst country borders are recognised internationally the categorisation of continents is less finite. If you have ever found yourself stumped by a pub quiz question on the subject or felt an injustice when your answer of 5 or 6 or 7 continents was marked incorrectly you are not alone, as ev...

3Feb

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Science & Technology

What’s the deal with…coral bleaching?

The news broke earlier this week that a new coral reef system was discovered at the mouth of the Amazon River last year, appropriately named the Amazon Reef. The 9,500km² ecosystem was a surprise discovery to researchers when it was found off the coasts of French Guiana and Brazil, and an important one. 2016 was also the year that an obituary to the Great Barrier Reef, later revealed to be premature, went viral and spread panic about the state of the world’s coral reef systems. Rest assured, Nemo’s home is still alive and kicking, but is nevertheless under significant threat. Therefore, the locating of other reef systems is somewhat reassuring but coral reefs in general are suffering, mostly at the hands of a phenomenon called coral bleaching. Bleaching enamel or hair to possess pearly ...

24Jan

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Science & Technology

Love in a test tube?

As the 14th of February approaches once again, the population seems to fall into three categories: those that embrace the sentimentality and romantic significance of the day, those that ignore the occasion completely, or those that wish the nauseating selection of sickly-sweet cards, red rose bouquets and heart-shaped novelties were thrown into an industrial shredder. Most of us will experience falling in love at some point, on average twice in our lifetimes in fact, and may choose to celebrate 'catching the feels' on this annual celebration. Regardless of how you view love, as some magical, mysterious entity or otherwise, the same biological factors are thought to be at work from person to person (sorry). It is widely accepted that there are three main stages to falling in love: lust, ...

What’s the Deal With…three-person babies?

20Jan

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Science & Technology

What’s the Deal With…three-person babies?

Thought your family was complicated? Try having three parents. The news broke this week that a woman in the Ukraine gave birth to a healthy baby girl conceived using the genetic information from three people. This novel IVF technique was recently approved for medical use in the UK, but how can this all be possible and why would we even bother in the first place? The key players in all of this are mitochondria. These organelles are small (on average only 0.002mm in length) but mighty and, to reference the classic line taught at GCSE biology, 'the powerhouses of the cell'. This means they supply energy to nearly all body cells and have a key role in other processes like programmed cell death or 'apoptosis'. Unfortunately, for around 1 in 5000 babies in the UK every year, genetic mutati...

2Dec

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Features

What’s the Deal With….GM Crops?

We all know the importance of eating our 5 a day and you may even be chomping down on a salad right now. But would you feel differently if that lettuce was genetically modified? Should you even feel differently at all? First, a little GM crop history. Some of us may remember the first GM food that went on sale in the UK. In the mid 1990's, supermarkets began stocking tomato products based on modified crops. Whilst intended to be the first of many GM products on the way, the move proved hugely controversial and the produce was pulled from sales within 3 years. But what actually are GM crops? In short, it is any plant that has had its DNA altered, be that to increase crop yield, increase its nutritional content, enable better defences against pests or viruses or to withstand environmental...

29Nov

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Features

The Anthropocene extinction: the first, mass loss of life caused by humanity?

By 2020, animal populations on Earth will have experienced a 67% decline, on average since records began in 1970. To put that in context, that is the equivalent of nearly 5 billion people dying by 2066, and no one being born to replace them. This is the frightening new data presented by the WWF and the Zoological Society of London in their new 'Living Planet 2016' report. Vertebrate species, so those with a backbone, are declining at a rapid rate, and whilst not included in this particular paper, it is reasonable to assume similar levels of decline are being seen in some invertebrates, plant and fungal species too. Some scientists have gone as far to predict that the Earth could even be experiencing its 6th mass extinction, the most recent being the so-called K-Pg extinction that famous...

What’s the Deal With….Antibiotic Resistance?

18Nov

By Grace YeadonNo Comments

Features

What’s the Deal With….Antibiotic Resistance?

This week marks the World Health Organisation's 'World Antibiotic Awareness week', running from the 14th to the 20th of November. But why choose to have a week dedicated to these medications and why have antibiotics become such a headline grabber in recent years? The short answer is something most of us are aware of: antibiotic resistance, a phrase that sounds scary, and without beating around the bush, it is. Since the discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin, by Alexander Fleming in 1928, over 100 different anti-bacterial medications are now being used to treat infections globally. From tuberculosis to gonorrhoea, we often take for granted that if we become unwell, antibiotics will always be there to treat the infection. Even Fleming himself all those years ago warned that over-u...