Gene editing gives fruit flies monarch abilities Researchers have edited the genes of fruit flies to make them able to digest the toxins in milkweed like monarch butterflies do. It took just three genetic tweaks to give the fruit flies that ability. Science News Bumblebees lose sleep over parental duties Bumblebees have been observed refraining […]
Originally developed in the context of condensed-matter physics and based on renormalization group ideas, tensor networks have been revived thanks to quantum information theory and the progress in understanding the role of entanglement in quantum many-body systems . Ikerbasque Research Professor Román Orús, one of the world foremost authorities in the field, has just published […]
Forming large groups (flocks, banks, swarms, herds, schools, …) is characteristic of many species. The generally accepted idea is that it is an adaptive process, in which the individual improves its chances of survival by being part of a numerous group. A shark does not know which fish to attack in a sardine bank and […]
Christian List, a German professor in the London School of Economics, is one of the most prolific and intelligent authors in the new generation of philosophers of social science. He has authored and co-authored a formidable number of extremely interesting papers in areas like social choice, formal epistemology, judgment aggregation, deliberative democracy or political philosophy […]
Organisms lived on Earth 3.5B years ago Organic matter dating back 3.5 billion years has been identified in stromatolites first discovered in Australia in the 1980s. “The organic matter that we found preserved within pyrite of the stromatolites is exciting; we’re looking at exceptionally preserved coherent filaments and strands that are typically remains of microbial […]
Quantum simulators—systems that can be engineered and manipulated at will—are useful platforms for verifying model Hamiltonians and understanding more complex or elusive quantum systems. The ability to trap and control particles with the help of well-controlled electromagnetic fields has led to revolutionary advances in the fields of biology, condensed- matter physics, high-precision spectroscopy, and quantum […]
The Mars 2020 rover mission is the next step in robotic exploration of the Red Planet. Unlike Curiosity, Mars 2020 will try to find answers to key questions about the potential for life on Mars, seeking signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life […]
We started this series discussing the basic ingredients of the Universe: events, spacetime, causality. In the last chapter , we introduced massive objects (and thus, matter), which appear as a generalization of the so-called photon box. As it moves, any object traces a path. Physicists call it worldline . We established that a massive object […]
Altered Ebola virus induces immune response in monkeys Researchers found that exposure to a slightly altered Ebola virus induced an immune response in monkeys that protected them from the parent virus. The goal is to produce a drug that knocks out the VP35 protein in the Ebola virus, although researchers cautioned that it may not […]
The concept of mean free path is very simple and straightforward: the average distance travelled between collisions by the molecules in a gas, the electrons in a metallic crystal, the neutrons in a moderator, etc. Assuming a couple of things about, for example, how elastic collisions are, it is not difficult to arrive to formulas […]