Science

While few people can remember the details of their first hit, everyone can identify with the rush of satisfaction, the tingling delight that starts on the tip of your tongue and then courses through your entire body.

Sleep is perhaps the most important, complicated, and misunderstood physiological mechanism that keeps us alive.

All COVID-19 statistics lead to the same conclusion: the young ones, our children, are at the lowest risk of getting ill or dying from the virus. That’s comforting. But the pandemic does pose a certain danger to them.

Our planet may be fittingly compared to the 1994 film, Speed: A bomb is planted on a bus and rigged to explode when the bus slows to less than 80 kilometres per hour. The bus barrels through Los Angeles, hitting obstacles and endangering the lives of passengers and pedestrians until a solution is found.

Genetic testing is a new frontier in preventive medicine. But beyond this border, there lies a minefield of trial and error.

Although the results do not seem spectacular yet, at least to the majority of the population, probably the most remarkable advances in the field of healthcare in the last 30 years relate to the mapping of the human genome (completed in 2003), the genome of other animal and plant species, and the development of bioinformatics.