By Kaitlin Carson Are alterations in diet during pregnancy enough to change the course of offspring development? Insights from the Dutch Hunger Winter, a famine that occurred near the end of World War II in which food supplies were severely restricted for a period of 5 months, have helped us address the effects of diet … Continue reading The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease: The Role of Maternal Nutrition

By Rachel Kallus, PsyD Over the last few years, organizing has evolved from your least favorite chore to a trendy topic on social media, Netflix reality shows, and loads of advertisements. Organizing icons and brands like Marie Kondo and The Container Store have become household names we refer to constantly. With people spending more time … Continue reading Treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): Is surgery an option?

By Stephen Matthews, Ph.D. TL;DR: Genetic variants can be linked to diseases through genome-wide association studies. While some variants are found in protein coding genes, many are found in non-coding regions of the genome, leaving their relevance to disease unclear. My work identified the role of a Crohn's disease-associated SNP in a non-coding region of … Continue reading What’s Diss? Explaining my (diss)ertation titled “Investigating the Wnt/MYC axis in the pathogenesis of Crohn’s disease”

By Gail D'Souza Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Yes, we have all heard of it. HPV is a common sexually transmitted disease that people can be exposed to as early as adolescence.1 Currently, there are 79 million HPV-infected Americans, and an estimated 14 million new HPV infections recorded annually.2 Most cases are detected in young adults in … Continue reading Why should children get the HPV vaccine?

By Mike Sha Let’s take a quick trip through the groundbreaking theory of statistical mechanics and use it to smash our current understanding of the universe to pieces. Around the late 1800s, Ludwig Boltzmann (Figure 2) started thinking about order, disorder, and atoms, a line of thought that led him to become the father of … Continue reading We’re All Just Boltzmann Brains, Living in a Boltzmann Universe: A Crash Course in Statistical Mechanics

By Ian Hayman Bird Flu. Ebola. Hantavirus. Dengue. Zika. SARS-CoV2. Bubonic Plague. West Nile. Malaria. These pathogens are often cast as the central antagonist, the great evil in many books, movies, and in real life. Even hearing their names can produce a visceral response, a sense of dread in the back of the head about … Continue reading Controlling Outbreaks Before They Happen – Targeting Emerging Diseases at the Source

By Carson Purnell Early in 2020, the tone around the Covid-19 pandemic quickly changed from a ‘bad flu’ to a worldwide catastrophe, to be compared to the 1918 flu pandemic’s 50-100 million deaths1. Nobody in the world had specific immunity to this pathogen, and it was clear the novel coronavirus was highly contagious and had … Continue reading Recycling Pseudoscience for the Coronavirus Pandemic

Thank you to everyone who voted for Lions Talk Science’s Best Blog Post of the Spring 2021 semester! The results are all in, and your favorite LTS article from the Spring semester was "From Blood to Bone: What it Means to Donate Your Body to Science" written by Ellie Lesko. For her winning article, Ellie will receive a $25 gift card. Additionally, our randomly … Continue reading Winner of Spring 2021 LTS Best Blog Post

By Victoria Silvis From childhood we are taught to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables while taking it easy on the sweets. Everyone knows these healthy foods are rich in important vitamins and nutrients, whereas sugary foods are often labeled as “empty calories” as they have no nutritional benefit. I find that while most are … Continue reading Buffet for Bacteria: How Diet Can Affect Your Microbiome

By Hannah Johnson Photo Credit: Rebecca Robbins, Mars Wrigley Global Innovation Center from https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/new-natural-blue-food-coloring Have you ever wondered about the industry behind the color of your food? So much of what we eat is transformed into more vibrant and distinguishable colors and this is especially true for manufactured foods, such as candy, cereal, and jelly. … Continue reading The Search for Blue No. 1