DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) carries genetic information for the development and functioning of an organism. It contains the instructions for making proteins, which perform many different functions in cells. However, DNA doesn't just become a protein; it must go through several stages to reach the final modified product.
Health superstitions get passed down by parents, repeated by teachers, and occasionally even stated by doctors who learned them decades ago and never had reason to update. What makes most of these myths interesting is not that they are obviously absurd - it is that they are almost always wrong in a specific and instructive way. They contain misapplied, oversimplified biology which is stretched well beyond what the underlying mechanism can actually support. This article picks apart three of the most common body and health myths and replaces them with what is actually happening at a molecular level, which, in every case, turns out to be more interesting than the myth it replaces.
As summer 2026 approaches, you spend a day at the beach. You meant to reapply sunscreen after swimming but got distracted. By evening, your skin is tight and red. By the next morning, it is painful to touch, and a few days later it starts peeling. Most people think of sunburn as a surface-level problem, a result of too much heat, too much light, and your skin just gets irritated. The reality is far more interesting and considerably more alarming. Sunburn is your body's response to molecular damage happening inside the nucleus of your skin cells. The redness, the pain, and the peeling is the result of ultraviolet radiation chemically altering your DNA.
In 1921, insulin was discovered and since then diabetes has been transformed from a fatal condition to one that can be managed. Nonetheless, there are still significant challenges that remain, even with centuries of medical advance in insulin therapy. The inconvenience for those with diabetes to constantly monitor blood glucose levels, calculate insulin doses and balance exercise and diet is still an issue even with all of our modern technology.
Have you ever gone on your phone for 5 minutes and ended up scrolling for an hour? I certainly have. These behaviours aren’t random, they are linked to how the brain is wired. One of the chemicals associated with this is dopamine. This is a hormone which is involved in motivation, learning and habits not just pleasure, it can affect our everyday behaviour.
Every year, an estimated 100-400 million people are infected with dengue virus worldwide, with about 400,000 annual deaths. It is one of the fastest-growing infectious diseases on the planet, fuelled by urbanisation and climate change pushing Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the primary vector, into new territories. However, despite its scale, the tools available to fight dengue have remained frustratingly limited. Vaccines have struggled to work reliably across all four dengue serotypes, chemical repellents offer only modest protection, and community-based source reduction has shown little sustained impact in clinical trials. Scientists needed a fundamentally new approach.
