Nauka

In the last decade, the interest in human stem cells in therapy increased due to the demand for new technologies for curing particular diseases. Some time ago, “organoids”- organs-like structures from stem cells in our body were created, just like in a science fiction book. Organoids can provide knowledge about the complexity of the organs, how they work, grow, or even how the diseases form on them. However, this new “tool” raises several ethical and moral issues. Ethics behind the use of human stem cells to grow the brain Most attention gets to brain organoids as the matter of undefined existence of developed consciousness as it is the characteristic of the brain. However, is the creation of new healthy organs beneficial for society to cure diseases located in the brain? The questio...

In order to celebrate the fact that Perseverance reached the Red Planet, I decided to write the overview of us, Terrestrians and our history with Mars. The NASA Mars Exploration Program currently has five operating missions on the Red Planet, all with the same goal: answer question “Is there life on Mars?”. But let’s start from the very beginning, shall we? God of War It is hard to say when was the first time that Mars was recorded as a wandering object on the night sky, but it is known that by 1534 BCE ancient Egyptian astronomers already knew about its retrograde motion. Later, Babylonian scientists would regularly record the position of the planet, and thus make systematic observations of its behavior. They even developed some arithmetic techniques to predict the futu...

Bushfires in Australia. (source: nytimes.com) In recent days, with the coronavirus Covid-19 worldwide outbreak, it seems as if everyone have forgotten about the climate change crisis, one that has caused Australian bushfires, which burnt over 186 000 square kilometers of land across the continent, claimed 34 lives and caused an environmental disaster. Black summer More than a billion animals were killed and back-then-threatened species were pushed towards extinction. Thousands of homes were destroyed, leaving millions of people seeking shelter. What began as just several uncontrolled fires back in June 2019, have quickly escalated, acquiring the name of Black Summer. One of the factors that can be linked to these fires, is the increase in the global temperatures. The curr...