Articles tagged with 'The Conversation' | University of Manchester

Hearing loss is a major global issue. Around 5% of the world population, 430 million, have disabling hearing loss. With ageing populations, this burden will only increase.The primary remedy is the simple hearing aid. It is an essential helpmate to en...

This article is part of the Insights Uncharted Brain series. There are many competing theories about what causes Alzheimer’s disease. Here, Ruth Itzhaki reflects on a career dedicated to one of the more controversial lines of research.When I was abou...

Sheena Cruickshank, University of ManchesterAs the pandemic continues, many countries are rolling out COVID booster vaccines. In the UK, the autumn booster campaign is offering a fourth dose to those at higher risk from a COVID infection, including p...

‘We suppressed our scientific imagination’: four experts examine the big successes and failures of the COVID response so farThe World Health Organization declared COVID a pandemic on March 11 2020. In the two years since, countries have diverged on t...

Jeff Bezos is on a mission to conquer ageing. He has just recruited Hal Barron from GlaxoSmithKline to help lead Altos Labs, the ambitious new anti-ageing company with billions of investment. So what does science really say about this? Could we beat ...

The journey to a pig-heart transplant began 60 years agoOn Friday, January 7 2022, David Bennett became the world’s first person to successfully receive a transplant of a pig’s heart. The eight-hour-long operation by surgeons at the University of Mar...

With omicron having rapidly driven up COVID infections, attention is once again focusing on antibodies, and reasonably so. They play a critical role in fighting off viruses and are important for preventing the coronavirus infecting our cells. This is...

If you ate too much over the festive season, you may well be thinking about a healthy diet plan for 2022. But as anyone who has ever dieted knows, there are countless options out there. Right now, we’re in the midst of a revolutionary time for unders...

From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health agencies around the world failed to collect the information we needed to truly understand the role of work and workplaces in the spread of the virus. We saw this failure in Canada, the United...

ShutterstockAndrew Whitehouse, The University of Western Australia; Jonathan Green, University of Manchester, Kristelle Hudry, La Trobe UniversityA therapy for infants showing early signs of autism reduces the chance of the child meeting diagnostic ...

PIC SNIPE/Shutterstock Sheena Cruickshank, University of ManchesterSeveral countries – including the UK – are now offering third COVID-19 shots amid reports of vaccines proving less effective over time. But do these countries really need to embark o...

Kapichka/ShutterstockBy  Matthew Paterson, University of ManchesterEvery few years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the United Nation’s climate science body – produces a major report on the state of the climate crisis. However...

Late last year, I asked: is it safe to have more than one type of COVID-19 vaccine? A trial has now addressed that question, as well as what effect combining different vaccine types has on immunity.Most COVID-19 vaccines require two doses, and the us...

Getting everyone in a country vaccinated is like watching software updates load: it whizzes along for the first 80% or so and then seems to take forever to finish the rest. Around 80% of the UK adult population has received at least one dose of the v...

shurkin son/Shutterstock Some viruses, such as measles, mumps and meningitis, can cause hearing difficulties, but what about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19?In the first few months of the pandemic, a rapid systematic review of COVID-19 an...

Millions of people across the world have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Countries are also now embarking on massive vaccination campaigns to control the virus and protect their most vulnerable citizens. One of the bigg...

  GroovyPanda/Shutterstock The COVID-19 lockdown upturned the lives of teenagers at a time when they are usually becoming more independent and taking steps toward their future. Instead, they were confined to their homes, exams were cancelled, and the...

Newly released research suggests that levels of antibodies against the coronavirus have declined across the UK population since testing began. Having randomly sampled 365,000 people across the country, the React2 study – which is yet to be peer revie...

As President Trump claims that he is immune to COVID-19 and isolated reports emerge of reinfection, what is the truth about immunity to COVID-19? To date, there have been six published cases of COVID-19 reinfection, with various other unverified a...

Our circadian rhythm is an important aspect of our health. kanyanat wongsa/ Shutterstock Every living human is controlled by an internal “clock” which drives our circadian rhythm – the natural internal process that regulates our sleep-wake cycle ...

In the event of a stroke, the well-known mantra is “time is brain”. Even small delays in identifying symptoms and seeking specialist care can be detrimental to a patient’s recovery and long-term quality of life. This is the case even for relatively m...

insta_photos/shutterstock  Young people with chronic health conditions cope with all of the usual challenges of growing up – making friends, changing schools, adapting to new situations, developing a sense of self, and dealing with interpersonal ...

During lockdown, we saw how the pandemic was leading to new forms of social solidarity. In addition to claps for carers and rainbow pictures, the very act of staying home was a demonstration of a collective responsibility to protect the vulnerable. I...

A newly developed 3D printed treatment is helping to give medics and victims a game-changing alternative to catastrophic limb amputation. ...

When Google promoted a software engineer named Chade-Meng Tan to the role of “Jolly Good Fellow”, his career – and the entire culture of Silicon Valley – took a sharp turn. Meng, a cheerful employee valued for his motivational qualities, went from...

France recently passed an amendment to its Agriculture Bill. It prohibits any product that is largely based on non-animal ingredients from being labelled like a traditional animal product. This essentially bans product names such as “vegetable steak”...

The World Health Organisation set a goal to eliminate hepatitis C by 2030. The NHS recently announced that it will go one better than that: it will eliminate the disease in England by 2025. In theory, the goal is achievable, but there are still signi...