November 18 th is the annual European Antibiotic Awareness Day . Its purpose is to highlight the increase of bacterial resistance to antibiotics on the continent .

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.

Around 700,000 people are killed by antibiotic resistant infections in the world every year, estimates say. Antimicrobials are increasingly overused and misused, while some organisms are becoming more resistant to antibiotics.

“Let’s start from the end. Our project will not really end in our lifetime”. Puzzling as it may sound, the statement comes from Sarah Goldberg, researcher at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, one of the leading scientific institutions in Israel.

Genes are the latest trend in nutrition, at least going by the burgeoning  legion   of Internet companies offering diets tailored to our genetic make-up.  These services are relatively affordable and simple to use.

For the first time in its history, the Global Seed Vault on the Svalbard Islands, Norway, has authorised a withdrawal. It was requested in 2015 by Syria, a country where the war is endangering the local agricultural seed collections.

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.