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Articles on Biochemistry

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Ever wondered how the small, white ibuprofen pill turns off your headache? from shutterstock.com

Explainer: how do drugs work?

Have you ever wondered how the small white ibuprofen pill turns off your headache? Or how a regular antidepressant keeps your brain chemistry in balance?
Tomas Lindahl, pictured here in the lab, along with Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. EPA/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA

Nobel Prize in Chemistry highlights how our bodies can repair our fragile DNA

The recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry showed that DNA is far from static. Rather, it is bombarded by damaging forces, but our bodies know how to repair these precious strands.
Stephens’ banded snake is one of Australia’s few arboreal (tree-dwelling) venomous snakes. Timothy Jackson

Why I Love: surrounding myself with venomous critters

Most people avoid venomous creatures, but they can also teach us a lot about chemical reactions that take place outside of the body - or exochemistry.
People who attribute mental illness to brain disease or genes tend to blame affected people less, but see them as more hopeless and dangerous. lauren rushing/Flickr

Brains, genes and chemical imbalances – how explanations of mental illness affect stigma

Depression, schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions are increasingly linked to abnormalities in the brain and in our genes. Many professionals believe these developments hold the key to better treatments…
In them, began life. University of Utah

Chemists show life on Earth was not a fluke

How life came about from inanimate sets of chemicals is still a mystery. While we may never be certain which chemicals existed on prebiotic Earth, we can study the biomolecules we have today to give us…
Feeling fruity: the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum forms ‘fruiting bodies’ Robin Williams

Want a new epilepsy drug? Bring on the amoebas

Many therapeutic drugs and toxins affect us without us knowing exactly how. We know, for example, that Epilim, or sodium valproate, one of the most highly prescribed medicines for epilepsy can prevent…

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