The 2022 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to a trio for the contribution of "click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry." Click chemistry is a new method of manufacturing molecules that can accelerate drug discovery by utilizing a few practical and reliable reactions. The winner of the 2022 Chemistry Nobel PrizeDr. Carolyn R. Bertozzi is a Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. In 2000, she started utilizing click chemistry in living organisms. She developed a bioorthogonal method which involves a set of reactions in living organisms. These reactions, though, do not disrupt the cell's regular activity. Such reactions are used to [...]

Photonics is the science of light. It is the technology of generating, controlling, and detecting light. Scientists have been studying light for hundreds of years. At the beginning of the 20th century, Max Planck and later Albert Einstein proposed that light behaves as a wave as well as a particle, which was a very controversial theory at the time. How can light be two completely different things at the same time? With experimentation, this duality of light was confirmed. The word Photonics appeared around 1960, when the laser was invented by Theodore Maiman. It brings together physics, electrical engineering, and [...]

Phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary history and relationships between groups of organisms. Phylo is defined as “race or tribe, or a group of organisms” and genetics is the scientific study of “genes and hereditary”. Phylogenetic relationships are often shown through trees (figure below) in which the pattern of branching is an evolutionary reflection of a particular species from its common ancestor. One such phylogenetic tree we are all familiar with are family trees. Family Trees visually map relationships of kin through understanding the origin that makes up our unique self. Growing up, people would often comment that I look [...]