THE SCIENCE HUB

Welcome to our hub of science facts and useful videos for interested audience members, schools groups and vocational dancers to learn more about how the body moves! 

What makes us move?

Motor Neurones!

Please watch this short yet informative film from our 2021 partner the incredible Patani lab based at The Francis Crick Institute about how movement originates from the brain and travels down long thin cells called Motor Neurones. Sadly in MND it is the motor neurones that are affected causing the atrophy or wasting of muscles as they are now long firing signals to our muscles.

Watch the video

Learning about Muscles?

How many types of muscle are there? How do they contract? What types of muscle cell (muscle fibre) are there?  This fantastic bitesize guide will tell you what you need to know?

Click here for the guide

Some of our research and choreography has investigated Fast & Slow Fibre Types?  Are you a sprinter or a marathon runner?

Click here to find out!

Patterns in muscles fibres look at all the incredible pattern that our skeletal muscles make we used only these patterns in all four sections of our flashmob!

Please meet…

Professor Emma Hodson-Tole

Please meet our lead 2022 Star Cells 2 research scientist Professor Emma Hodson-Tole from Manchester Metropolitan University

Meet Emma here

Lucy Lintott

Meet someone who has inspired our entire project over the last 5 years the resilient & inspirational MND campaigner and warrior Lucy Lintott https://lucysfight.com

Meet Lucy here

About motor neurone disease (MND)

  • MND is a fatal, rapidly progressing disease that affects the brain and spinal cord.
  • It attacks the nerves that control movement so muscles no longer work. MND does not usually affect the senses such as sight, sound, feeling etc. 
  • It can leave people locked in a failing body, unable to move, talk and eventually breathe.
  • Over 80% of people with MND will have communication difficulties, including for some, a complete loss of voice. 
  • It affects people from all communities.
  • Around 35% of people with MND experience mild cognitive change, in other words, changes in thinking and behaviour. A further 15% of people show signs of frontotemporal dementia which results in more pronounced behavioural change. 
  • It kills a third of people within a year and more than half within two years of diagnosis. 
  • A person’s lifetime risk of developing MND is around 1 in 300.
  • Six people per day are diagnosed with MND in the UK. 
  • It affects up to 5,000 adults in the UK at any one time. 
  • It kills six people per day in the UK, this is just under 2,200 per year.
  • It has no cure.

 

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About the MND Association

  • The MND Association focuses on MND care, research and campaigning across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
  • They improve care and support for people with MND, their families and carers.
  • They fund and promote research that leads to new understanding and treatments, and brings us closer to a cure for MND.
  • They campaign and raise awareness so the needs of people with MND and everyone who cares for them are recognised and addressed by wider society.
Visit MNDA Website

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