“Diabetic urine”, the surgeon Herbert Mayo wrote in 1832, “is almost always of a pale straw or greenish colour. Its smell is commonly faint and peculiar, sometimes resembling sweet whey or milk.” The use…
Dogs really are our best friends. A study published today in Current Biology shows not only do dogs and humans read emotions in each other’s “voices”, but both are more attuned to “happy” sounds. And the…
Our short series, the Science of Medical Imaging, examines the technology behind non-invasive methods of creating images of the human body. In this third and final instalment, we look at the basics of…
Helium is God’s gift to humankind. It’s particularly fantastic for science and medicine and has allowed us to make an enormous number of fundamental advances. We use it for a whole vast array of things…
You may have read last week that a team of researchers has developed, for the first time, a way to detect the contents of people’s dreams. But what can we glean from this research? During the same week…
It’s been referred to, somewhat disparagingly, as blobology, but MRI technology has the potential to improve treatment for epilepsy – in part thanks to developments in computing. Identifying where seizures…
If I had been asked 15 years ago to write a short piece about what the different parts of the brain did, it would have been a fairly straightforward task. Not any more. Over the last 15 years, the methods…
For more than 200 years, scientists have known the range of colours we can see means there must be three different types of light-responsive cells in our eyes. These three types of cell, along with the…
How do we choose? Consumers imagine themselves as rational decision-makers, able to weigh up the relative costs and benefits of decisions to arrive at reasoned choices. Yet, a growing body of research…