Cancer is a major global health problem. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there was an estimated 19.3 million new cancer cases and 10 million cancer-related deaths worldwide in 2020, representing an increase of 28% in the global cancer burden since 2010 (WHO, 2020). One of the main challenges in cancer treatment is late diagnosis and its consequential negative impact on patient outcomes. According to the American Cancer Society, the 5-year survival rate for breast cancer is 90% when detected at an early stage, compared to 15% when detected at a late stage (American Cancer Society, n.d.)....
Have you ever doubted how the agricultural supply manages to feed the exponentially growing world population? One of the keys is to provide nitrogen, an essential nutrient for good yields, through the use of nitrogenous fertilizers. The question then becomes: Where does all that nitrogen come from?....
A common question we often encounter is: is mutation of virus truly predictable, and isn't it random? Well, the short answer is, virus evolution is not equal to mutation. Mutations are random errors occur during the replication process of virus, and they do not have a preference on their destination. Yet virus evolution is a complex process shaped jointly by virus mutation, the host immune response, and the environment.....
Ketchup can be a struggle to work with. You may have seen the following when a ketchup bottle is taken out of the fridge. Try and fail to tip the ketchup out. Smack the bottle hard, many times, and wait even longer, and suddenly all the ketchup splashes out at once and you end up with much more than you need. Ketchup is a very versatile condiment – it goes well with all kinds of food – so everyone who uses it may have similar experience repeatedly. But why does this keep happening? And why does it happen with ketchup specifically?.....
There is a general belief that injections are better than oral intake pills as it gets drugs into the bloodstream through direct injection into the veins. The body can thereby better absorb and assimilate the drug. We therefore see many medications introduced by forms of injection. This includes but is not limited to insulins injections, chicken pox and measles vaccines, and of late, the COVID-19 vaccines. However, there is a concerning number of patients worldwide who have contracted diseases even after vaccination. It was, therefore, necessary to develop medications for treatment of those diseases. With the advancement of more potent agents to deliver oral drugs to enhance their absorption and efficacy, on top of the advantages of non-invasiveness and simple administration, in both preventing and treating diseases, pharmaceutical companies have come to develop oral pills to combat the novel and ever-mutating COVID-19 virus. In this article, we will delve into the topic of oral-intake pills and vaccines in our battle against COVID-19.....
Like many other people living under the pandemic, Eric used to buy bottled beverages and take away with polystyrene containers and cutleries. What Eric and other people do not know is that we are creating lots of plastic wastes. According to the report of "Monitoring of Solid Waste in Hong Kong – Waste Statistics for 2020" published by the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department, around 2,312 tonnes of plastic wastes were produced every day in Hong Kong (ranked 3rd and about 21% of the total municipal solid waste).....
Should I go out today? Should I accept the job offer? Should I marry this person? Every day, we make decisions on trivial and important matters through our brain. The brain is the most energy-demanding organ of our body.…
The concept of ageing is a mysterious process and raises many questions. Why do organisms age? Why do we die at different ages? What are the mechanisms that underlie ageing? This is especially intriguing when scientists observe varying lifespans of one laboratory mice strain, consisting of genetically identical individuals...…