The AstroCell Blog - Exploring The Wonders of Biology & Physics

Surely almost everyone who has used a computer has pondered this question, just why does the QWERTY keyboard exist? The alphabet goes “ABCDEF” not QWERTY so wouldn’t it be typical to apply that instead of this odd, seemingly random format? You might assume QWERTY was the best option, but what if I told you the real story is far weirder? First let’s talk about some alternatives we have to the typical QWERTY keyboard– from today and the past. One is the stenography keyboard, it’s an extremely odd layout that doesn’t even contain all the letters of the alphabet. What makes it a unique alternative isn’t about how the alphabet is organized differently on it– putting aside the fact that the entirety of it isn’t even present on the keyboard– but what it is actually supposed to do. A stenography keyboard is designed to maximise efficiency, rather than typing the spelling of a word it requires you to type the way the word is pronounced, and the lesser letters don’t hinder this, they enable you ...

As you might know, the planet we live on spins at incredibly high speeds at all times. At the equator– which is the fastest part of the earth– the Earth reaches speeds of around a whopping 1,670 kilometres per hour, for reference, the sound barrier is broken around 1,234 kilometres per hour so if anything else moved at that kind of speed it would be outstandingly fast.  So then this brings forth the question, just why are we fine if the planet is spinning this fast? Well that’s because of the gravity that saves us, it counters the centrifugal force– in a sense– of the earth’s speed that would have otherwise flung us faster than the speed of sound. Now this brings forth an even more interesting doubt, just what exactly would happen if the earth ceased this rotation for let’s say, 5 seconds? Well a quick spoiler– it would be devastating!  One might think that there won’t be any other effects other than us getting dizzy since the earth’s spin that we’re so used to is no longer th...

Our eyes are quite literally our lens to the world, shaping not only how we see the world around us but also how we form our thoughts, beliefs, and reactions to life. For people who have grown up with functional eyes, living a life without sight would be unbearable. The thought of going through the rest of your days without seeing the faces of loved ones, nature and colour is by no means pleasant. We shape our reality primarily on the basis of what we see. But the question is, ‘Is what we see actually all that is there?’. Even though we consider what we see to be absolute, what we can perceive is actually but a piece of the puzzle. The eye relies on visible light, which doesn’t have the caliber to reveal the arrangement of atoms or the vast empty spaces between them. This limitation raises questions about the completeness of the knowledge it provides. Optical illusions further highlight that the eye can sometimes mislead us, emphasizing the need for additional ways of knowing to supple...

Treating cancer has been puzzling doctors since antiquity. With the first unsuccessful attempt at surgically removing a tumour being nearly 4,000 years ago in ancient Egypt, the field of cancer biology has certainly come a long way. In order to combat a disease like cancer, an entirely new paradigm-shifting approach to medicine, “Gene Therapy”, has shown remarkable success in curing certain types of cancers in adults as well as in children and has saved millions of lives across the world.  The most notable advancement in the field of cancer immunotherapies is without a doubt: the advent of CAR-T cells or 'Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cells'. CARs are engineered receptors that effectively redirect T cells to cancer surface proteins that express a particular target biomarker . The unprecedented success of the anti-CD19 CAR T-cell in curing leukemia and lymphoma resulted in the approval of the first CAR-T cell therapy by the US-FDA in 2017 . While CAR-T cell therapy demonstrates r...