Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution and the Science of Life, Dr Kat Arney

Cancer has always been with us. It killed our hominid ancestors, the mammals they evolved from and the dinosaurs that trampled the ground before that. Tumours grow in pets, livestock and wild animals. Even tiny jelly-like Hydra – creatures that are little more than a tube full of water – can get cancer. Paradoxically, many of us think of cancer as a contemporary killer, a disease of our own making caused by our modern lifestyles. But that’s not true. Although it might be rare in many species, cancer is the enemy lurking within almost every living creature. Why? Because cancer is a bug in the system of life. We get cancer because we can’t not get it.

Cancer starts when cells revolt, throwing off their molecular shackles, and growing and dividing out of control in a shambolic mockery of normal life. This is why we can’t avoid cancer: because the very genes that drive it are essential for life itself. The revolution has raged, on and off, for millions of years. But it was only in the twentieth century that doctors and scientists made any significant progress in understanding and treating cancer, and it’s only in the past few decades that we’ve finally begun to kick the mob’s malignant arse. Now the game is changing. Scientists have infiltrated cancer’s cellular rebellion and are finally learning its secrets.

Geneticist and science writer Kat Arney takes the reader back to the dawn of life on planet earth right up to the present day to get to the heart of what cancer really is and how by better understanding it we might one day overcome it.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @Kat_Arney
Facebook: facebook.com/KatArneyWrites
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kat-arney-27767b1a
Website: katarney.com

Professor Vivian Wing-Wah Yam, 任詠華

Professor Vivian Wing-Wah Yam is a chemist whose work on brighter and more efficient organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) has led to the development of more efficient displays for mobile phones and laptops. These OLEDs can be deposited on a variety of materials, including clear plastic and glass, leading to better car headlights and larger flat screen TVs.

Yam’s aim is to reduce the amount of energy used in lighting by developing much more efficient lights and displays. Her research focuses on creating new photoactive materials by combining metal atoms with organic molecules that can absorb or emit light at a range of wavelengths and efficiencies.

Photoactive materials with tunable absorption and emission colours and other properties may lead to the development of materials that can more efficiently store solar energy, improving photovoltaics and solar fuels, and improving OLED displays and white organic light-emitting diodes (WOLEDs) for solid state lighting.

Other uses for these photoactive materials include harvesting sunlight for the photocatalysis of water to produce hydrogen gas, sensing biological molecules such as the amyloids found in Alzheimer’s disease, or even developing new binary optical memory for digital data storage.

In 2001, she became the youngest member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in 2011 she became a L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science laureate. This year, she was a recipient of the 2022 American Chemical Society (ACS) National Award, The Josef Michl ACS Award in Photochemistry.

She is currently working on developing OLEDs with cheaper, more abundant metals such as nickel. She’s also investigating organic resistive memory which relies on molecules that don’t conduct electricity at low voltages, but can conduct at high voltages thus creating a binary resistive memory.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @VivianYam1
Website: web.hku.hk/~wwyam/yam/homepage/

Further reading

• Vivian Wing-Wah Yam, Wikipedia
• Vivian Wing-Wah Yam, SPIE
• Women in Chemistry — Interview with Vivian Yam, Vera Köster, Chemistry Views, 6 July 2011
• Profile of Vivian W.-W. Yam, Farooq Ahmed, PNAS, 14 Mar 2013
• Asia’s Scientific Trailblazers: Vivian Yam, Kami Navarro, Asian Scientist, 10 November 2020
• HKU renowned chemist Professor Vivian Wing-Wah YAM receives 2022 American Chemical Society (ACS) National Award – the 2022 Josef Michl ACS Award in Photochemistry, The University of Hong Kong, 4 October 2021

Pros and Comms, Maaria Ginai

In Pros and Comms, scientist turned life sciences communications professional Maaria Ginai talks to experts from different sectors to find out how to create science comms stories that resonate with your audience. Recent episodes explore:

• bias in science with Emily Sena, senior lecturer in preclinical research at the University of Edinburgh and editor in chief at the BMJ Open Science journal;
• academia and entrepreneurship with Shara Cohen, former scientist, serial entrepreneur and the founder of mumsinscience; and,
• science and the media, and the public viewing science process in real time through the pandemic with Fiona Fox, the CEO of the Science Media Centre in London.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @Maaria_Ginai, @prosandcomms and @MowbiUK
LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/in/mginai

Professor Sau Lan Wu, 吳秀蘭

Born in Hong Kong, Professor Sau Lan Wu is a Chinese American particle physicist who was a member of the teams that discovered the J/psi particle, the gluon and evidence that points to the existence of the Higgs boson.

In 1974, Wu was part of an MIT team working with the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Using the high-intensity proton beams to bombard a target, they discovered a strong peak at 3.1 billion electron volts, indicating that they had found a new particle which decayed into electron-positron pairs. This was the J/psi particle, and it provided experimental evidence of the Charm quark. The discovery of the Charm quark was so momentous that it was called the November Revolution and led to the establishment of the Standard Model of particle physics.

In the late 70s, Wu’s mathematical analysis of three ‘jets’ of energy produced by particle collisions led to the discovery of the gluon, a particle which ‘glues’ quarks together to form protons and neutrons. She was a co-recipient of the 1995 European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize for this discovery.

Wu spent over thirty years in search of the Higgs boson. She was a group leader at ATLAS, one of two groups working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the other was CMS), and although they observed a number of candidates, none of their results were statistically significant.

On 4 July 2012, following experiments by both ATLAS and CMS, CERN announced the discovery of a boson with the same characteristics as those predicted for the Higgs boson by the Standard Model. Wu’s team had worked on understanding the decay of the Higgs boson into two gamma rays or into four leptons, and this work was crucial to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She continues to work on the Higgs boson, and is also now searching for the particles that make up dark matter.

Further reading

• Sau Lan Wu, Wikipedia
• Sau Lan Wu: The Discovery of the Higgs (video), Vassar, 8 November 2012
• Meet Sau Lan Wu, the physicist who helped discover three fundamental particles, Massive Science, 5 April 2017
• Three Major Physics Discoveries and Counting, Joshua Roebke, Quanta Magazine, 18 July 2018
• A Pioneer’s Perseverance, Preston Schmitt, On Wisconsin, 2019
• Sau Lan Wu: Particle Physicist, Caitlin Shaffer, Ex Libris Universum, 20 May 2020

How Was That Built? The Stories Behind Awesome Structures, Roma Agrawal

Join Roma Agrawal, the award-winning structural engineer who worked on The Shard, for an exciting behind-the-scenes look at some of the world’s most amazing landmarks.

Meet the extraordinary people who challenged our beliefs about what’s possible, pioneering remarkable inventions that helped build the Brooklyn Bridge in the US, the Pantheon in Italy, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Shard in England and the Sapporo Dome in Japan. Discover the ingenious methods engineers have come up with to enable us to build underground, underwater, on ice and even in space. And learn about the impact different forces and materials can have on a structure by carrying out your own engineering experiments from the ‘Try it at Home’ sections.

Beautiful and detailed illustrations by Katie Hickey, including cross-sections, skylines and close-ups of engineering techniques in action, provide unique and illuminating perspectives of our most awe-inspiring constructions.

Get ready to see the built world around you like never before!

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @RomaTheEngineer
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/roma-agrawal-mbe-56ab4315
YouTube: Roma Agrawal
Website: www.romatheengineer.com