It’s a staggering statistic. Covid killed almost seven million worldwide. The number is likely higher.

Meanwhile, a potentially deadlier pandemic sweeps the planet — Bacterial infections antibiotics can’t cure.

According to one UK government study, by 2050, ten million may die annually, infected by multi or pan-resistant microbes no drug will kill.

Drug resistance is the ineluctable result of antibiotic overuse or misuse – to treat viral infections, for example. What doesn’t kill infectious bacteria makes them stronger. So, science searches for new ones.

The trouble is, Big Pharma isn’t interested. There’s no profit to be made developing drugs that will end up on the top shelf, reserved for emergencies, when no other drug will work. Big Pharma wants to produce drugs that billions will use, all the time – precisely how antibiotics can’t be used, or else they’d become useless!

So, academic researchers are picking up the slack.

At McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario a team of scientists are screening thousands of hopeful candidates, totally new kinds of antibiotics, that bugs have never seen, and are unlikely to become resistant to.

And, for hot tips on what will work and what won’t, they’re turning to artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning.

Jon Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Since ancient times, nothing has fascinated human beings more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work.

The identification and description of living things has come a long way since ancient Greece and Rome. Today, biologists use DNA barcodes to identify living creatures.

a DNA barcode is a small fragment of DNA that’s characteristic for a species. A half-dozen standardized barcodes exist for different groups of organisms. COX1 is used to identify animals. Botanists use a chloroplast gene. The ‘Internal Transcribed Spacer’, or ITS barcode, is used to identify fungi. Bacteria have their own barcodes too.

Within any broad group, that standard barcode varies from species to species. A digital device reads it, just like a supermarket scanner reads the barcode on a can of soup or a roll of toilet paper. Predictably, DNA barcode readers are getting small.

Here’s a story about that. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Dutch biologist Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader (David Kattenburg)

Men are from Mars, women from Venus, John Gray famously wrote, back in the nineties.

Science says it’s true – sort of: male and female brains are wired differently.

Sandra Witelson is a veteran brain researcher, with a collection of over a hundred brains she’s been gathering for years. Albert Einstein’s was the first. The differences between male and female grey matter – especially in the language and speech regions – interest Witelson greatly.

Witelson’s studies revolve around brain lateralization – anatomical and functional differences between people’s right and left cerebral hemispheres just above the ears. And, how male brains get sexualized. At the tender age of five weeks, male embryos get doused in testosterone, changing them and their brains forever.

Sandra Witelson is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Sandra Witelson (David Kattenburg)