Small But Mighty: The Big Impact of Little Things

Dementia is a condition that affects memory and thinking skills, making daily life difficult. In the UK, around 850,000 people currently live with dementia, and this number is expected to rise to 1 million by 2025 and 2 million by 2050. Despite ongoing research, there is still no cure. One major challenge is diagnosing the condition early and accurately. This talk will discuss innovative research at the University of Manchester aimed at improving dementia diagnosis and its potential impact on patients and healthcare.

How does the heart beat? The answer lies in the movement of small electrically charged particles, ions. With each beat, ions move in and out of an individual heart muscle cell to coordinate contraction. Because ions are charged, they cannot pass directly though the membrane of these cells. Instead, ions transit through specialised channel proteins which form tunnels across the cell membrane at a sub-nanometre scale. In this talk, we channel surf the variety of ion channels found within the heart, understand how they function and how these channels orchestrate the beating of a heart.