Gabriela Raducan - FIRE

A Global Initiative to Stop Wildfires!

The last wildfires season in Australia was terrible. Although my family and I weren’t directly affected by the fires, the air was very polluted. We would go out of the house only with masks, and we had air purifiers inside the house, to be able to breathe. There are many countries affected by wildfires, and even those that are not directly affected by wildfires, are affected by the air pollution.

I have an Australian PhD and deep expertise in wildfires, so through my not-for-profit called Tech4Future, I launched a global initiative to stop wildfires called F.I.R.E.(Fire Initiative in Research and Education).

Particle physicists want to prove the existence of the hypothetical Axion-like particles that might be constituents of the mysterious dark matter but haven´t been seen so far.

Scientists are Conducting Fundamental Research With ‘Speed Machines’!

Particle physicists claim they understand the universe, but the complexity of this surprising paradox behind our universe reveals to us that still 95 percent of the universe is yet not understood nor has it been seen directly. Mind dazzling indeed but if our universe would not contain e.g. entropy, wiggling particles possessing their own “wiggle-room” so to speak and slow, non-excited, as they seem to be, “hippy particles” as some of its fundamental components, we would not have the complex world we see today, including you and me.

fat female seal

How do seals regulate their fat stores?

Being too fat is bad for humans. But for seals, being fat is essential. They use blubber to stay warm in the water and to supply fat to fuel their metabolism when they come ashore. There’s a lot we don’t understand about how they regulate their fat reserves. How can they be so fat and stay healthy? How do they withstand and manage the big changes they experience in fat stores throughout the year? How does their energy balance respond to rapid natural or human-induced changes in their environment?  In this Royal Society and NERC funded collaboration between Abertay University, the Sea Mammal Research Unit, and Plymouth University,  Dr Kimberley Bennett borrowed a method from biomedical science to investigate how seal fat works to start to answer these questions.

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Targeted enhancement of placental function.

Four years after Lisa´s Masters of Research in Maternal and Fetal Health at The University of Manchester, her paper “Placental Homing Peptide-microRNA Inhibitor Conjugates for Targeted Enhancement of Intrinsic Placental Growth Signaling” is finally published in Theranostics. In simple terms, it’s all about targeting the placenta in order to enhance its function by delivering therapeutic molecules to it. Here, Lisa´s going to talk about why on earth they did this research, how they did it, the results and what they mean!