Bernard Kloareg is the director of the Station biologique de Roscoff , a major science facility for marine research located in the Brittany region of France.

One litre of sea water contains about one billion bacteria.

Might it be possible to make better plants more quickly than we do today? And without the public objection that accompanies genetic manipulation? Climate change means that this is now an urgent question.

Peanut, egg and soy are more common food known to trigger an allergic reaction, a problem affecting around 8% of children in the EU. Intuitively, you might not list apples as causing allergic reactions.

Brian Wynne, professor of science studies at  Lancaster University , tells youris.com about his long time interest in  public risk perceptions  and how this relates to public attitudes to  genetically modified organisms  (GMOs).

With a prevalence of about 1 in 10.000, Ataxia is considered a rare hereditary disease that attacks the central nervous system. As a result, it is not at the top of the list in terms of research topics for pharmaceutical companies.

It strikes mainly children and young adults by causing abnormal fluid transport mainly in their lungs, pancreas and intestine. At its most advanced stage, cystic fibrosis still leaves no alternative other than lung transplant.

Whenever lamin mutations occur, the regulation of progenitor cell proliferation and differentiation in highly regenerative tissues, such as skin and muscles, spins out of control.

More than half of all deaths in Europe are caused by cardiovascular disease, and 80% of all these are due to atherosclerosis.

Embryonic or neural stem cells are key tools for future studies on Parkinson’s disease or other degenerative diseases. So far, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells implied the destruction of an embryo.

He made sense of something Darwin was at pains to speculate about, but couldn’t quite argue persuasively.

For a neurodegenerative disease that strikes later in life with neuronal dysfunction and subsequent cell death by showing a mind-boggling heterogeneity of subtypes, spinocerebellar ataxia had not been adequately tackled for a long time.

Claudia Castillo’s brand new, tailor-made windpipe, which European scientists created last year by lining the cartilage of a donated trachea with her own stem cells, has been heralding a new “cells into organs” era.

Since his seminal 1994 discovery of the Pax-6 gene as the universal master switch of eye formation, Professor Walter Gehring had to prove his point by expressing the mouse gene on the wings and legs of the fruit fly.

PCR tests have been hailed as the gold-standard in detecting and isolating COVID-19 cases. But they are more expensive than antigen tests and need a laboratory to process.

As future covid-19 prevalence varies across time, health authorities must revolutionise testing to see if people are infected.

Viruses were unknown to science when Charles Darwin conceived the theory of evolution in the 19 th century. Yet, to understand how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has spread and changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, we still need to use Darwin’s approach and think in evolutionary terms.

Viruses do not evolve with the purpose of being more or less infectious or dangerous: it is just natural selection at work. New random variants occur continuously and most of them are neutral or make the virus less infectious.

Since the World Health Organisation declared  COVID-19 a pandemic , progress has been made on testing, tracing and treating people infected with the virus, and industries have developed  several vaccines in a record time.

Darwin would be puzzled. He described natural selection as a slow process, selecting for the most suited organisms to a given environment.