SciencePonderings

Over the past century, AI has risen to stardom after its numerous appearances in big-budget films and best-selling books. However, movies focus on evil uses of AI when, in reality, AI has been a very beneficial tool. Take the recent Covid-19 outbreak as an example. Ai has been employed to model, track, diagnose, and help prevent the spread of the virus. One potential use of AI being explored is using AI to quickly generate a list of medical compounds that can bind to the virus, significantly speeding up the process of finding effective medicine.  Unlike antibiotics, antiviral medication binds to and disables a specific protein, not the entire virus. For example, scientists are targeting covid-19’s spiky surface proteins, peplomers. Peplomers bind to human ace2 proteins to enter our lung cells. Disabling the peplomers makes the virus ineffective.  Image of Covid-19 virus and its spikes Unfortunately, traditional methods of predicting how the tangled mess of amino-acids will loo...

Fun fact: Ice Cream in commercials is usually colored potatoes so they don't melt under the harsh and hot lights used to film. But we'll talk about real, sweet (potentially unmeltable) ice cream here. Back in 2017, Japanese scientists found that polyphenol, an antioxidant found in berries, could make ice cream last longer in the heat. Without over complicating it, basically, the polyphenol got the cream and fats of the ice cream to form a film over the rest of the dessert to hold it together for longer. The YouTube channel HellthyJunkFood made a DIY version of it, using pure polyphenol supplement capsules and some standard ice cream ingredients like milk, cream, sugar, and vanilla extract. When compared to normal Ben and Jerry's ice cream at 73 degrees Fahrenheit, the modified one maintained its form for about twice as long, lasting until just shy of an hour. Ben and Jerry's was a pudding around the 20-minute mark. Impressive for ice cream but could we do better? Ironic...

When we think of rust, we picture a reddish-brown, worn-out strip of metal that’s been left out in the rain for too long. However, we don’t usually think of our own cells rusting inside us. Admittedly, that statement may seem a little misleading, but both iron and our cells break down in a process called oxidation. After that process, iron turns into rust so it's not too much of a stretch to conclude that our cells undergo their own version of rusting as well. But what exactly is the process of oxidation and how do our cells undergo it? Oxidation makes up half of a process called oxidation-reduction reactions, also known as redox reactions. Redox refers to the transfer of electrons between molecules, ions, and atoms in a chemical reaction found everywhere from combustion to photosynthesis. Despite its misleading name, reduction occurs when something gains electrons while oxidation is the loss of electrons. To remember this, think of the acronym, LEO the lion says GER. LEO stands fo...