Author: José Iriarte, Professor of Archaeology, University of Exeter From the air, you see it only through the constant jolt, tilt and shudder of the low-flying Cessna aircraft. The landscape of the Llanos de Moxos, northern Bolivia, appears as a […]
Biochemistry • Biology • Chemistry • Geosciences • Planetary Science
Asteroids and planetesimals regularly bombarded Earth between about 4.6 billion and 3.5 billion years ago, during the Hadean and Archean eons. Because few rocks today are more than 4 billion years old, our understanding of the planet’s environment during that […]
In our previous entry, I explicated two different concepts that in many languages are subsumed under a single term ‘life’, or equivalent, but that in ancient Greek were separated as two truly distinct things: zoé , or life in the […]
Over a century ago, quantum physics revealed a surprising fact: truly identical particles do not behave like tiny billiard balls. When two indistinguishable particles meet under the right conditions, they can interfere with each other in ways that have no […]
Author: Kovi Rose, Astrophysics PhD Candidate, University of Sydney Kovi Rose, University of Sydney A pair of stars spiralling around each other. That’s the origin of a new source of repeating radio bursts we’ve detected, called ASKAP J1745. In recent […]
As we saw in our last entry, we must grant Gabriel that he does not conceive of the spirit and spiritual as an “immortal soul” or any similar ghostlike entity, but rather as something grounded in human thought—more specifically, in […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials • Quantum physics
When we study solid-state physics, we usually begin with crystals. In a crystal, atoms repeat in a strict and regular pattern, much like tiles on a bathroom floor. Because every small region looks the same as every other, electrons move […]
Authors: Anna Jon-And, Director of Centre for Cultural Evolution, Senior Lecturer in Portuguese, Stockholm University and Johan Lind, Senior Associate Professor in Ethology, Linköping University Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don’t? It’s one of the most […]
Biochemistry • DIPC Biochemistry • Materials • Nanotechnology • Pharmacy
Nanoparticles, those minuscule marvels measured in billionths of a metre, hold immense promise for revolutionizing cancer treatment. Their ability to deliver drugs directly to tumours could transform therapies, but only if they can navigate the dense, complex environment of tumour […]
Author: Melissa Lee, Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematics, Monash University Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary Hungarian […]
Author: Victoria Guerra-García, PhD candidate at the University of the Basque Country, Dept. of Linguistics and Basque Studies (EHU) and member of The Bilingual Mind Research Group (Gogo Elebiduna) You’re in the middle of a conversation, and suddenly the word […]
Authors: Sarah Foster, Program Leader, Project Seahorse and Senior Researcher, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia and Amanda Vincent, Professor, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia Bottom trawlers extract one-quarter of the […]
Imagine trying to build a house without a blueprint, find a shortcut through an unfamiliar city without a map, or govern a large organisation with no leaders and no meetings. It sounds impossible. Yet tiny-brained ants, working without leaders or […]
Two years ago, in March 2024, I wrote in this blog about a decision that surprised many: the rejection of the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch. After fifteen years of work by an international team of experts, the proposal […]