I looked around as I chugged a cup of coke. Standing at the finish line of my 50km ultramarathon. There were a few spectators standing around, and a long table of medals to my right. Except it wasn’t the finish line. It was the halfway point. I had ran the…

How nanomaterials are made and the challenges that prevent large-scale adoption of nanotech — If Earth were the size of a basketball The circumference of the planet we inhabit is 40,075 km. Now imagine taking this massive planet, all its lands and oceans, trees and animals, and shrinking it down to the size of a basketball. If Earth were the size of a basketball, one nanometer would be the size of a…

Fertilizer and it’s importance for rural farmers in Sub Saharan Africa — If I asked you what the biggest problem with fertilizers are, I bet you’d say the environmental impact…which totally makes sense. Producing synthetic fertilizers uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of greenhouse gases (2% of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions to be precise) [1]. And then…

The basics of Hydroponics 🌱🥬🍅🌿 — The word hydroponics can be broken down into two parts: “hydro”, and “ponics”. The word hydro means anything related to water, and the word ponics means labor. Combining the two, hydroponics is a method of growing plants in water instead of soil. That’s cool, but why? 38% of the global land surface is used…

2 more kilometers. Then I can stop. My quads hurt. My calves hurt. My shoulders hurt. My neck hurt. My abs hurt. My brain was screaming at my muscles to stop. My legs were no longer cooperating with what I wanted them to do. …

Designing maize to be more efficient and resilient to external stresses to tackle food shortages and malnutrition. — Maize is one of the most important food crops in the world, together with rice and wheat, providing at least 30% of the food calories to more than 4.5 billion people in 94 developing countries. [1] Today, maize is considered the staple crop for most of Sub-Saharan Africa, consumed regularly…

A review article of why golden rice was made and the process of creating golden rice. — Table of contents Introduction Vitamin A Disease (VAD) B-Carotene Rice (oryza sativa) The Issue The Solution Poly-cis Pathway Phytoene Synthase Phytoene Desaturase ζ-carotene desaturase Lycopene β-cyclase Vectors pB19hpc vector pZPsC and pZCycH vectors Transformation Results Consequences and further development

This article will go over all the complex terms in gene editing that you will need to understand if you want to dive deeper into this area. From introns, DNA regulation and plasmids, to transfection, transcription and translation — we cover it all! — In this article I will will go in detail about many technical/scientific terms and concepts in gene editing and biology. Table of contents Nucleic acids: Bases, DNA, RNA, nucleotides, amino acids, polypeptides, oligopeptides, gene, codon, anticodon, adenosine 5'-triphosphate (ATP)

A technical article about the process of NHEJ & HDR, and how these two processes differ. — While I was doing research about genomics and CRISPR I came across all these different ways cells repair double stranded breaks (DSB). Homology directed repair, non-homologous end joining, homologous recombination and the list of processes goes on and on. …