the Runaway Lab Book

Many languages have a grammatical gender system. In these languages, objects that innately do not inherently have a gender are assigned a gender. However, they do not always agree! Sometimes, one language assigns masculine to a noun while another language assigns feminine. For instance, fork is feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish.

One of the perks of working in science is that occasionally you get to listen to really cool talks about dinosaurs!

During pregnancy, the mother’s body needs to physically adjust to make room for the baby. Organs get squeezed into a space that is much smaller than normal – the liver and lungs move upwards, and the bladder gets squashed (see interactive video here http://www.msichicago.org/experiment/make-room-for-baby/). On top of that, when the baby moves, the mum can…

Whilst one of the forms for the gene ALDH2, is rare amongst Europeans and Africans it is present in 30-50% of Chinese and Japanese. This variation is known to cause alcohol flush – i.e. face going bright red after drinking alcohol. On the other hand, 40-80% of the Chinese and Japanese population have the variant…

I thought it was interesting how different people may see food content differently. We are taught the main food content being protein, carbohydrate and fat when we are younger. Then we are told that there are other important nutrients, like vitamins. Even under the category “protein”, there are different amino acids; some people might pay attention…

Chopping raw garlic releases a number of volatile sulfur compounds. Of these, allyl methyl sulphide is the main culprit.In addition, our body is bad at breaking down allyl methyl sulphide and more gets made after garlic is consumed. The compound is passed into the blood, and eventually will exit our body through our sweat and breath, leaving the notorious garlic…