Scientists sketch face of 1,500-year-old Chinese emperor DNA analysis, an almost complete skull and open-source software have enabled scientists to reconstruct the face of Emperor Wu, who ruled China’s Northern Zhou dynasty around 1,500 years ago and whose remains were found in 1996. Scientists have extracted more than a million single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or differences in […]
Spontaneously broken symmetries are at the heart of many phenomena of quantum matter and physics more generally. However, determining the exact symmetries that are broken can be challenging due to imperfections such as strain, in particular when multiple electronic orders are competing. This is exemplified by charge order in some kagome systems, where evidence of […]
Computer science • Energy • Mathematics • Mechanical Engineering
Floating offshore wind (FOW) is one of the most rapidly growing forms of green power. As of 2021 though, there were only 113 MW in operation in Europe, although this figure is predicted to triple by the end of 2024, and escalate up to 10 GW by 2030 and 150 GW by 2050. The current […]
Deception is natural. All animals do it as a survival strategy; prey to avoid predators and predators to catch prey. Intraspecies deception, however, occurs mainly in the most intelligent species, for example among cephalopods, corvids and, of course, apes. Studies on the subject have found a direct relationship between the size of the neocortex and […]
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFETs for logic functions. CMOS technology is used for constructing integrated circuit chips, including microprocessors, microcontrollers, memory chips, and other digital logic circuits. After 50 years of continuous transistor size downscaling and […]
Human migration received help from Toba eruption A study on an archaeological site in Ethiopia has added to evidence that indicates the eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia 74,000 years ago might not have been apocalyptic. The study shows humans adjusted to arid conditions after the eruption in a way that might have aided migration […]
The geologists of the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) made a substantial decision on March 4, 2024 , by rejecting the proposal to formally acknowledge the beginning of the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch attributing humanity’s emergence as the primary force shaping the Earth’s strata. This proposal, led by the Anthropocene Working […]
Author: Ramón Muñoz-Chápuli has been Professor of Animal Biology in the University of Málaga until his retirement. He has investigated for forty years in the fields of developmental biology and animal evolution. Parasitism is very common among invertebrates, but much less so among vertebrates. The case of lampreys is well known. They attach to the […]
Tantalum is one of the rarest elements and has multiple stable isotopes. The least abundant tantalum isotope, Ta-180 is found naturally in a long-lived excited state, a feature unique to this isotope. In excited states, a nuclei’s protons or neutrons have higher than normal energy levels. Although energetically possible, the radioactive decay of this excited […]
The most recent, and probably most imaginative of the significant contributions to the philosophical debate on whether contemporary science confirms, or at least points to some kind of strongly teleological cosmology, is Philip Goff’s book Why? The Purpose of the Universe . In this book’s arguments, the author builds both upon the ideas about cosmological […]