We offer a range of competitive discounts for bulk order purchases of all our products. Our suppliers also feature regular offers, which we are able to pass onto our customers.
It can be difficult to locate and source the reagents you need at competitive prices. This is why we offer a service guarantee on every order placed with us: if your product doesn’t work for its intended application then we’ll refund you the full amount.
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From the 25th to the 31st October, the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) is celebrating National Honey Week, designed to raise public awareness for the importance of bees and honey.
Founded in 1874, the British Beekeepers Association is a registered charity whose main aims are “to further and promote the craft of beekeeping and to advance the education of the public in the importance of bees in the environment.” You can read more about the BBKA and their aims here.
Nowadays the charity encompasses more than 24,000 amateur beekeeper members nationally. The combined efforts of the charity and its members help to educate the general public to the importance of bees and the pivotal role they play in our environment, while furthering research into bee health and protection.
2BScientific is delighted to announce that it has recently signed a new distribution agreement with US reagents supplier Tonbo Biosciences.
Founded in 2011 by a team of immunologists, researchers and industry leaders, Tonbo Biosciences was conceived of a simple principle: giving back to the research community by providing high performance, value oriented products of the highest quality.
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We have a lot of time for the honey bee here at 2BScientific. You may have noticed her hopping from flower to flower, lazily gorging herself on various nectars, swaying haphazardly around your back garden, but don’t let this drunken demeanour fool you. The honey bee is an incredibly diligent and complex insect.
A honey bee’s job is predetermined at birth, depending entirely on whether it is born a drone, a worker or a queen. Each of these castes enjoys a wildly different lifestyle, all contributing towards the combined success of their hive.
A day in the life of each caste is a distinct experience, and it would take more space than we have in this article to cover them all, so today’s post will cover the worker bee. It is the worker bee you have mostly likely encountered bobbing through your garden, and hers is arguably the most important role anyway.
Let’s look at a day in her life to find out why.
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As you find yourself spending increasingly more time outside this summer, the chances are you’re going to bump into a bee or two.
Many people are afraid of bees, lumping them into the same pest category as the infamous wasp, but there’s really no need to be. Bees are beautiful insects, and for the best part they are peaceful, only stinging as a last resort.
In fact, bees play a vital role in our ecosystem, ensuring the annual pollination and propagation of many of our favourite plants and flowers. Without them, everything from the face of the UK countryside to the state of our economy as we know it would change.
Let’s look at this in more detail:
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Research ethics is the application of strong ethical principles to the process of scientific research.
The adherence to ethical principles within a body of research ensures the authenticity, the fairness and the safety of the research by maintaining honest, objective and responsible research practices.
But what are ethical principles, and how do they ensure better scientific research?
At its simplest, ethics is a term used to describe a moral code used for distinguishing between right and wrong, and the behaviour that results from this.
One of the most famous ethical codes is the Hippocratic Oath, taken by medical professionals to ensure ethical practice, but in reality ethics makes up an important part of our lives on a daily basis.
For the best part, we learn a comprehensive appreciation for ethics throughout our lives. In childhood we find ourselves faced with situations that force us to address for the first time what is right and wrong behaviour.
These lessons follow us throughout our lives, forming a benchmark against which we might gauge our actions and those of others, often without consciously knowing it.
Sometimes, however, we find ourselves coming into conflict over the ethics of an action or decision. This is known as an ethical dispute, and marks a moment when one person’s ethical understanding clashes with someone else’s.
Ethical disputes raise the issue of interpretation within the field of ethics.
Because we all lead different lives, each made up of wildly different experiences, people and lessons, it is unsurprising that our ethical interpretations vary.
One way of settling ethical disputes is to reference the law. Many societies have laws built around a core of ethics, with the end goal of maintaining a just, morally fair society.
It is worth noting, however, that the terms are not interchangeable. Not everything that is legal is ethical, while some illegal activities might well be.
Another way is to consider the context in which the ethics are being applied.
Ethics plays an important role in scientific research for a number of reasons.
Ethics typically promotes honesty, furthering truthful research and accurate knowledge, while dissuading lies, falsifications and the manipulation of data.
This is of great importance to the scientific community, whose research findings almost always depend on the accuracy of data to corroborate hypotheses and predictions.
Ethical codes decree that researchers are accountable for the research they undertake. This helps to promote responsibility across bodies of research, while warning researchers away from cases of misconduct, human rights violations and unfair censorship.
An ethical code demonstrates strong moral concerns on the part of the researchers, creating a greater sense of trust and integrity surrounding a project or body of work.
This can lead to more practical benefits, such as increased public funding, or wider circulation across publications and websites.
These values of trust and accountability can also increase the cooperating strength of research, furthering key characteristics of collaborative work, for example joint authorship, copyright, mutual respect and moral fairness.
At 2BScientific, ethics matter. As a customer-facing business and a component of the science industry, we know the value a strong ethical code has in securing the trust of our customers.
This is why we only source reagents from the industry’s most reliable manufacturers, ensuring you get the ethically-produced, quality products that you need to make your research a success. Nobody does more for the customer.
Our code of ethics extends beyond the lab to include an awareness for wider environmental impacts, specifically the plight of the bumblebee and the pivotal role he plays as a pollinator in our ecosystem.
This ethic code translates into funding, which we offer the British Bee Keepers Association to help their research into the recent decline of the bees.
In a field that demands integrity, accuracy and responsible implementation, ethics play an important role in regulating the standards of research practices.
This regulation is crucial to the authenticity and accuracy of any research project; only by taking the time to consider the wider ethical implications of your research can you get the most from your work – and your results.
For more information about 2BScientific’s range of ethically-produced reagents, call us directly on +44 (0)1869 238033 or get in contact here.
From the handrails on the bus to the cutlery in your staff canteen, the world is full of harmful pathogens. There’s no getting around them; everyday you find yourself exposed to countless bacteria and viruses.
Left unchecked, these would run rampant through your body, resulting in any number of diseases and illnesses.
Often the only thing standing between these pathogens and you is the effectiveness of your immune system.
Generally considered one of our greatest evolutionary advantages, the immune system is your body’s biological response system that protects you against disease. It works by specifically identifying harmful agents in your body, such as bacteria and viruses.
Once detected, these pathogens find themselves under attack from your immune system, which in most cases destroys them before they can do you proper harm.
The immune system can be divided into two main layers: the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system.
The innate immune system is a general first defence, responding broadly to a range of cellular alarms and distress signals in order to fight microbes in a general, non-specific way.
Our adaptive immune system is the next level of defence, evolved to offer a stronger, more specific response to harmful pathogens. It offers immunological memory, enabling tailored responses and faster defences against future reinfections.
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New research has found that influenza causes a surprisingly strong reaction in the usually more placid immune systems of pregnant women. The finding could lead to new treatments for pregnant women with sever influenza. Immunologically speaking, the developing foetus is a foreign object to a mother’s immune system.
So to prevent rejection of the foetus their immune systems are usually reigned in somewhat, even at the risk of being more open to infections. Flu seems to be particularly risky for pregnant women, and is more likely to lead to pneumonia and severe complications.
During the 2009 swine flu (H1N1) pandemic, infected pregnant women in Australia and New Zealand were 13 times more likely to be admitted to hospital with a serious illness than non-pregnant women. The researchers in this study took natural killer (NK) cells and T-cells – both important in fighting viral infections – from pregnant and non-pregnant women before and after a seasonal flu vaccination.
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