Victoria's blog

Lately a team from the John Innes Centre have received a regulatory approval for making their genetically modified tomatoes a product in US markets. The team have created a new kind of tomato that will live 2 times longer on a store shelf than a regular one by incorporating genes from snapdragons into DNA of tomato and making it rich in anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are compounds naturally occurring in blue or purple fruits, so when the team made a tomato with high-levels of those compound, not only the tomato became purple, but they have discovered that anthocyanins are the source of many advantages like long shelf-life, protection from UV damage and pathogens, lowering risk of type 2 diabetes, cancer and dementia in humans. There is also a study where cancer-prone mice fed with purple tomatoes have lived 30% longer than the mice who ate regular tomatoes. Personally speaking, that piece of news sounds pretty exciting and I can’t wait to see if purple tomatoes will become a wanted product...

  Even though we all know what rain looks like and why it occurs, there are still plenty of facts about it that many of us haven’t heard about. First of all, when we imagine rain drops, they are usually tear shaped, and it's not how they really look like. Rain drops have spherical shape and the bigger the drop, the flatter they become, so before it starts to rain we can already recognise how big the shower will be after studying a single drop shape on the ground. We can also recognise a heavy shower by the speed of drops hitting the ground, because the weight of huge drops make them fall really fast. Also many places that we associate with rainy weather are not as wet in statistics and it’s because it might be raining there every single day, but most of the time those are light drizzles. It’s all about the number of millimeters of rain per year that counts and not the number of rainy days. Also, the rainfall in millimeters can differ for every single meter of the ground, so the mea...

  A lot of us start to feel less motivated, less energetic or just sad when the weather gets cold and days are shorter. But when the spring arrives all of those feelings disappear for many people, and what happened to them was a type of depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder (in short Sad). During those months, life can get very challenging, but there are actions that can improve our mood. For example, exposure to as much natural light as possible, more exercises or at least walks outside, naming three good things in nature, or even doing activities that will force you to smile like watching something funny on TV. It is also good to find a new hobby and have a healthy sleep routine. In my opinion, all of those things may be good for your health and low mood, but I don’t think it’s enough for everybody. There are cases where people have no motivation to even get out of bed or do basic hygiene, so things like finding a hobby can be impossible for them. Also watching something ...

 Lately scientists have found a parasite that only affects dogs, that is a good candidate for cure for cancer. N. caninum is a microorganism that can cause severe neurological diseases for some animals, but for people it works in immunotherapy for cancer- it induces a strong immune response and even destroys cells it infects (in this case cancer cells). In my opinion, this information is very promising. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world even with many therapies we have already invented, so finding even more is a big thing. While chemotherapy and radiotherapy have bad side effects because it attacks non-cancerous cells, immunotherapy is so much better, because it stimulates the patient's body to attack those cancerous cells without harming the whole body. Even though I am not a doctor, I can still telI, that N.caninum has remarkable effects on humans in this case. Immunotherapy seems like the best way to fight currently incurable cancers, so findings like this...