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John Hewitt

John Hewitt

Author

John's background is physics and neuroscience. He worked in industry for many years in a variety electrical and mechanical engineering roles. He also ran CRE precision, a machine shop specializing in the design of biomedical instruments, for 10 years. He sold the business in 2012 to pursue the goal of full time science reading, and has been able to find gainful employment writing in the fields of neuroscience, cell biology, and general technology.

Articles by John Hewitt

Medical Xpress / New liquid biopsy techniques at the bleeding edge of cancer

(Medical Xpress)—There's many buzzwords being thrown around in medicine these days. In cancer treatment, blanket terms like "precision medicine" and "immunotherapy" hint at the promise of a rapidly changing technology base, ...

Jun 10, 2016
Phys.org / Using the 'deuterium switch' to understand how receptors work

(Phys.org)—The market value for deuterated drugs has recently been estimated at over a billion dollars. Such drugs are simply molecules in which one or more hydrogen atoms are replaced with deuterium. While these kinds of ...

Jun 7, 2016
Phys.org / The jumping Frenchmen of Maine and the ineluctable requirement of molybdenum

(Phys.org)—The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine is a puzzling neurological syndrome named after a few peculiar 19th-century lumberjacks. Their defining symptom was an unnaturally exaggerated jumping reflex when startled. Georges ...

Apr 26, 2016
Tech Xplore / The Flyboard Air hoverboard

When you post video of your new jet powered hoverboard, and half the world thinks it has to be fake, you know you've got something good. But Frank Zapata's Flyboard Air is no hoax, it's the real deal. How does one know? All ...

Apr 16, 2016
Phys.org / Mapping the nuclear pore complex: 1.5 billion years of innovation

(Phys.org)—If asked to describe the differences between humans and frogs, a child might say that one hops and rib-its while the other walks and talks. If we ask that same child how to build a frog, they will probably need ...

Feb 24, 2016
Phys.org / New evidence for the vibration theory of smell

(Phys.org)—The predictive power and galvanizing influence that theoretical models routinely enjoy in physics is only rarely replicated in biology. Lord Raleigh's theory of sound perception, Francis Crick's sequence and adapter ...

Feb 22, 2016
Phys.org / Researchers massively edit the genome of pigs to turn them into perfect human organ donors

(Phys.org)—One benefit of the closeness between pigs and humans is the potential to be organ donors. There are however, just a few nagging uncertainties that still stand in the way. The big one, the possibility of porcine ...

Oct 8, 2015
Phys.org / The hidden evolutionary relationship between pigs and primates revealed by genome-wide study of transposable elements

(Phys.org)—In the past, geneticists focused primarily on the evolution of genes in order to trace the relationships between species. More recently, genetic elements called SINEs (short interspersed elements) have emerged ...

Sep 23, 2015
Phys.org / Macrophages create the elusive spermatogonial stem cell niche

(Phys.org)—Every organ strikes its own balance between self-renewal and differentiation. At one extreme is the brain, where only a few isolated outposts are known to contribute to a largely quiescent population. At another ...

Sep 3, 2015
Phys.org / Neural qubits: Quantum cognition based on synaptic nuclear spins

(Phys.org)—The pursuit of an understanding of the base machinery of the mind led early researchers to anatomical exhaustion. With neuroscience now in the throes of molecular mayhem and a waning biochemical bliss, physics ...

Aug 27, 2015
Phys.org / Reprogramming the oocyte

(Phys.org)—Among other things, the egg is optimized to process the sperm genome. The cytoplasmic factors that make this possible also give the egg the ability to reprogram the nuclei from other kinds of cells if these nuclei ...

Aug 26, 2015
Medical Xpress / Horizontal transfer of mitochondria in sickness and in health

(Medical Xpress)—Two of the most enticing ideas in cells biology have recently converged to create a paradigm shift of epic proportions. The first is that not only is it possible for mitochondria to emigrate from their host ...

Aug 20, 2015
Phys.org / Driving myelination by actin disassembly

(Phys.org)—If a metallurgist wanted to determine how a blade was made they might cut a small cross section, mount, polish, and etch it, and then look at it under a microscope. They could probably tell right away whether it ...

Jul 27, 2015
Medical Xpress / Mitochondria control oncogenesis through metabolic reprogramming

(Medical Xpress)—Perhaps the boldest attempt to date at a single unified explanation of cancer is that offered by Albert Szent-Gyorgi in his classic book, The Living State. That was over 40 years ago. His insights on the ...

Jul 10, 2015
Phys.org / Quality, quantity, and freshness in the reproductive game

(Phys.org)—Many intuitions drawn from our machine world do not smoothly extended to the biological. Whereas the screws or other fasteners used in an automobile typically tend to loosen over time with use, the hardware found ...

Jun 4, 2015