✴︎ The
Hypothesis
The Online Edition of the Berkeley Scientific Journal
Research & Blogs Department
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CRISPR Provides the Potential to Cut Down Malaria: But Should We?
by Saira Somnay Mosquitos: not just pesky causers of bug bites, but also deadly agents of infection. Should scientists find a way to get rid of them, or would that cause more harm than good? Society may have to answer that question soon. A research team at the Imperial College in London has formulated a…
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Recent Breakthroughs in the World of 2D Materials
Author: Kevin P. Nuckolls In the past few years, the search for new and exciting two-dimensional materials has taken over both the field of material science and nanotechnology. These materials have displayed previously unimaginable characteristics, including their novel electronic properties or extraordinary mechanical characteristics, making them some of the best candidates for solving some of…
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Earth Week 2015: How you can help
Every year, we celebrate Earth Day on April 22 to mark the anniversary of a movement that started in 1970. The founder, Gaylord Nelson, then a US Senator of Wisconsin, thought of the idea after the 1969 massive oil spills in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement (much of which started here…
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Editor’s Picks
Light’s dual nature as both a particle and a wave has confused us all since the theory was proposed. For the first time, scientists have captured a photograph of light behaving as both a particle and a wave, using electrons to image the light. Ever wonder why you really can’t eat just one potato chip?…
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Professor Jennifer Doudna explains RNA Therapeutics and DNA Editing
[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qECgqd6wJb0[/embedyt] Professor Jennifer Doudna explains some of her discoveries in RNA therapeutics and DNA editing at the World Economic Forum. Read her original publication here – or, if that gets too technical, read this article that delves into the story behind her research.
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Editor’s Picks
After a hiatus of nearly a year, Berkeley Scientific Journal is proud to announce that our blog is back! Our aim is to provide a platform for young scientists to discuss issues they are passionate about, and share their thoughts with the public. “Editor’s Picks” is a new series of posts that will regularly feature…
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The Reading Revolution
For years scientists have asserted that language is the one characteristic that sets humans apart from animals. The ability to speak and communicate is believed to have emerged around 50,000 years ago, along with the development of tools, and the increase in brain size. Scientists have identified the Broca’s and Wernicke’s regions as associated with…
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Reconstructing Memories
On September 11, 2001, when I was seven years old, I sat in an elementary school classroom, watching footage of a plane crashing into the Twin Towers on a small television screen. My mother tells me she also remembers exactly what she was doing when the world found out about Princess Diana’s death. Nearly everyone…
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Are You Nothing More (Or Less) Than A Soft Machine?
There is something tantalizingly romantic to me about the objectivity of science. There is something about how the structure of a tail of a twirling galaxy, and that of a hurricane hurdling around its eye, is fundamentally the same. One could even say these entropic laws provide the crystal resolution of an inevitable architecture at…
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Reading Between the Atoms – Writing on the Nanoscale
“Why can’t we write the entire twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin?” Richard Feynman offered up this daunting challenge (with a rather paltry $1000 prize) at his famous 1959 Caltech lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” – a seminal event in the history of nanotechnology. In 1985,…
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Evolution and Consciousness
Archaeopteryx, found in 1861, was the first transitional fossil discovered that suggested intermediate forms between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds. Unearthed just years after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species”, Archaeopteryx seemed to support Darwin’s theories about evolution. Since then, 28 other transitional species between birds and dinosaurs have been discovered, as well as…
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Genome editing just got a lot easier
This post is cross-posted with the PLOS Student Blog If you’ve recently taken a glimpse at the front page of any major science news outlet, it is likely you are no stranger to an emerging genome editing technology known as CRISPR/Cas9. With the help of RNA, Cas9 (a bacterial enzyme) can be programmed to target specific…