See the Cool Ways Science Is Being Applied to Everyday Life

Many people have heard about CRISPR, but very few actually know what it is, how it works, or even what the big deal is. Well scientists have been excited about the CRISPR system for a while and hopefully, even if you aren't a scientist, I can spread some light on why this will be a big deal going forward. So What Is It? CRISPR stands for Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Palindromes are sequences that read the same backwards and forward. So for example madam is a palindrome because it spells the same thing backwards in forwards. In DNA, ACDCA would be a palindrome. CRISPR are specifically DNA sequences found in bacteria, and play major part of the bacterial defense system from things such as viruses. So you might be wondering how it does that? Well, each palindromic repeat is followed by DNA that is nonpalindromic. These pieces are foreign DNA from something that tried to invade the bacteria perviously. Think of it like some guy breaks into your house, a...

Aedes Aegypti, a major form of transmission of many deadly diseases. Source When was the last time you were bitten by a mosquitoe? If you are in a tropical area it was probably pretty recent. Not only on the bites extremely annoying, but they can also transmit diseases like malaria and West Nile. I'm sure that almost nobody has fond memories of mosquitoes. Lucky, a company called Oxitec is trying to eliminate mosquitoes, and it is entirely possible that they can. So trying to stop mosquitoes is nothing new. There are repellants of all kind, and different tricks you use to prevent being bit. None of them really work. However, this company is doing something different by trying to reduce the population of mosquitoes, specifically Aedes aegypti ,  all together. And they are doing it using mosquitoes. Now, time for some fun science. The first thing the company does is insert a gene (there are multiple ways to do this so the exact method Oxitec does it is not clear) into male m...

So what is color blindness exactly? Well, in every eye there are things called cones that are sensitive to different color lights. Normally, humans have three different types of cones that are each sensitive to blue, green, or red. However, in certain cases with humans it is possible for some of the rods to have shifted color sensitive or the rods are missing all together, causing dramatic decreases in visual range. For examples, anomalous trichromatism is when there is a shift in the sensitive of one the rods. A common example of this is when the peak sensitivity of the green cones moves toward a higher wavelength, overlapping with the sensitivity of the red cones. This leads to red green colorblindness, where people have a difficulty distinguishing between red and green and many of those colored objects take on a orange tint. A normal human has rods that can see three unique colors. People with anamalous vision, or dicromatic (only two function cone type) vision have a much more l...