Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials • Quantum physics
Graphene, a single sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb, was first isolated in 2004, and for years its electrons were treated as nearly independent travellers. That changed in 2018, when two sheets twisted by a “magic” angle produced almost flat energy bands, in which an electron’s energy hardly depends on its motion, together […]
Research now suggests that regular coffee consumption affects how our digestive system functions. A research team from the University of Copenhagen asked a group of Danish participants to swallow a small electronic capsule. As it travelled through the digestive tract, the capsule measured, among other things, transit time through the gastrointestinal system, temperature, pH levels […]
Chemical engineering • Condensed matter • Environment • Materials
Materials that glow are part of our daily lives, and even if we rarely notice them, their use nowadays is widespread. They light up the screens we look at for hours and the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in our homes; they enable biologists and physicians to explore cells, tissues and molecules using fluorescence microscopes; they turn […]
Authors: Guus Kroonen, Associate Professor, Scandinavian, Germanic and Indo-European Comparative Linguistics, Leiden University; University of Copenhagen; Eske Willerslev, Professor, Globe Institute, Section for Geogenetics, University of Copenhagen; University of Cambridge, and Hugh McColl, Assistant Professor, Globe Institute, Section for Geogenetics, University of Copenhagen Why do people speak Germanic languages such as English in England and […]
Porphyrins are among nature’s most important pigments. The name comes from the Greek word for purple, and the molecules are four small nitrogen-containing rings joined into a larger ring, with room at the centre for a metal atom. In the haemoglobin of blood that atom is iron; in the chlorophyll of plants it is magnesium […]
Isaac Reed, the author we quoted in our previous entry, contrasts his caricature of positivist social science with his own preferred, hermeneutic proposal, one in which the ‘context of investigation’ and the ‘context of explanation’ overlap to a certain extent, in a way that allows the scientist to ‘share’ the meanings that constitute the basic […]
A collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering and the University of Notre Dame has broken the world record for optical switching speed in quantum well LEDs. The gallium nitride micro-LED device has an optical modulation bandwidth of 2.75 gigahertz while consuming just 25 milliwatts of power. Its design was optimized […]
In 1960, Science, one of the world’s leading science journals, published an article with an unambiguous title: Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026. It predicted that on this future date —eleven days from today — the human population would approach infinity and effectively annihilate itself. The outlandishness of the claim landed the article widespread public […]
Biochemistry • Chemistry • DIPC Biochemistry • Pharmacy • Quantum chemistry
Fats do far more than store energy. They form the membranes that enclose every cell and act as chemical signals. Cells build and reshape them with enzymes, and one of these, ELOVL6, lengthens fatty acids by two carbon atoms. Embedded in the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum, an internal network where many lipids are made […]
Authors: Chloe Noteboom, student of the European Master’s in Clinical Linguistics, EMCL and Adrià Rofes, associate professor of neurolinguistics, University of Groningen. A hypnotist and a neurosurgeon walk into an O.R…. no, there’s not a punchline coming. Hypnosis is a technique being explored as an alternative to more standard methods of sedation in awake brain […]