Science
Three Things The Scientific Community Can Do To Filter Sketchy Research
Last month, Indonesia’s previous Minister of Research and Technology boasted that in 2019, Indonesia had overtaken Malaysia and Singapore in the number of published academic articles. However, scholars argue this ‘productivity’ is the result of a heavily criticised performance measurement system for academics based mostly on output and citations, instead of quality of research. The …
Will We Ever Cure Cancer?
We asked three cancer experts – Nobel laureate Professor Harald zur Hausen, Professor Walter Ricciardi and Dr Elisabete Weiderpass – for their thoughts on curing cancer. They all sit on the EU’s Horizon Europe mission board for cancer and will help to define a concrete target for Europe in this area over the next decade. …
Singapore Completes World’s Largest Whole Genome Sequencing Analysis Of Multi-Ethnic Asian Populations
A new genetic databank has been established containing the completed whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data of close to 5,000 Singaporeans. Worldwide, WGS is increasingly used in research and healthcare to identify genetic variations using cutting-edge technologies that allow large numbers of individuals to be sequenced rapidly – This new study is the world’s largest WGS analysis …
Singapore Scientists Simplify Lithium-Sulfur Battery Production to Meet Future Energy Storage Needs
Singapore scientists from NanoBio Lab (NBL) of A*STAR have developed a novel approach to prepare next-generation lithium-sulfur cathodes, which simplifies the typically time-consuming and complicated process for producing them. This represents a promising step towards the commercialization of lithium-sulfur batteries, and addresses industry’s need for a practical approach towards scaling up the production of new …
Why Newton’s ‘law of universal gravitation’ is not so universal after all
Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation is many things – revolutionary, elegant, mysterious – but, as it turns out, one thing we know for sure is that it’s not, well, universal. On the scale of our solar system, Newton’s observation – that objects attract one another with a force proportional to their mass and inversely …
NUS Researchers Develop New Drug That Fights Cancer With Less Renal Toxicity
A team of NUS pharmacists and chemists has developed a new anti-cancer drug that has less toxic effects to the kidneys. The new drug works like a ‘magic bullet’ that is delivered directly to the mitochondria — the power generators of cells — of cancer cells. Once the drug reaches the tumour, two active molecules — an …
Why Are Scientists So Excited About A Recently Claimed Quantum Computing Milestone?
A quantum computer may have solved a problem in minutes that would take the fastest conventional supercomputer more than 10,000 years. A draft of a paper by Google researchers laying out the achievement leaked in recent days, setting off an avalanche of news coverage and speculation. While the research has not yet been peer-reviewed – …
Singapore Scientists Discover New Ways To Treat Liver Cancer
Scientists from A*STAR’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), in collaboration with researchers from Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), have identified a protein, Agrin, which could be a novel target for developing therapies that can inhibit the growth and spread of liver cancer tumours. This is an important discovery because the researchers demonstrated …
Complex Birdsongs Help Biologists Piece Together The Evolution Of Lifelong Learning
Bonjour! Ni hao! Merhaba! If you move to a new country as an adult, you have to work much harder to get past that initial “hello” in the local language than if you’d moved as a child. Why does it take so much effort to learn a new language later in life? Our human ability …
Analysis Of Global Cancer Data Shines Light On Alternative Gene “Switches” In Tumours
Novel genomics and computational methods reveal how gene “switches” impact survival rates of cancer patients, paving the way to targeted cancer treatments Scientists from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)’s Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) have discovered that many human cancers exhibit widespread alterations in gene activation, where the same gene uses different …