The article describes a science activity designed to increase students' knowledge and awareness of the spread of COVID-19. It helps students achieve scientific literacy through improving their views about the nature of science and their argumentation skills. It also promotes students' engagement in scientific practices such as modelling,…

Traditionally we consider infection to arise from viruses, bacteria and parasites. Prions are infectious proteins without any nucleic acids, and therefore do not represent living things. Despite this, they have the ability to replicate themselves and cause diseases such as mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encepthalopathy) and human…

Mutations can cause genetic diseases and the vast majority of these have no effective treatment. They raise some difficult questions on the boundaries of science and social science. Selective breeding to "improve" the human race (eugenics) is often regarded as a Victorian relic or Nazi fantasy. Yet, three fetuses with Down syndrome are…

The Scientific Method is the series of processes by which hypotheses, ideas and theories are shown to be true beyond a reasonable scientific doubt. Most science "fact" is expressed in terms of probabilities rather than certainties. Thus, by means of statistical calculations, researchers aim to determine whether an observed association…

Few of us realise that the oceans of the world are a relatively untapped reservoir of new natural product-derived medicines to combat the many diseases that plague humanity. We explore the role that an unremarkable sea snail and sea squirt are playing in providing us with new medicines for the alleviation of chronic pain and cancer respectively.…

The decline of colonies of honey bees across the world is threatening local plant biodiversity and human food supplies. Neonicotinoid pesticides have been implicated as a major cause of the problem and are banned or suspended in several countries. Other factors could also be lowering the resistance of bees to opportunist infections by, for…