MI weekly selection #309
Mass extinction event likely result of warmed oceans, depleted oxygen
A mass extinction of nearly all marine animals approximately 252 million years ago was caused by volcanic activity that released greenhouse gases, resulting in warmer ocean waters and depleted oxygen. […]
The protective effect of symmetry in entangled photonic states
One of the most mysterious features of quantum mechanics is that if two particles (or photons) interact at some point in time then the properties of these particles will remain connected at future times. A consequence of this is that […]
Beer supply in danger
The history of Earth climate is characterized by a succession of glacial and interglacial periods. However, although climate change is inherent to Earth, the observed trend of temperature increase over the past century cannot be explained by climate models which […]
Enzybiotics, from phages to the inhaler.
Authors: Fernando González-Camacho, Bruno Corsini and Jose Yuste work at Centro Nacional de Microbiología, Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII) and Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Respiratorias (CIBERES), Madrid, Spain.
In the age of bacteria resistant […]
MI weekly selection #308
Star formation topped out around 10B years ago
A comprehensive study of high-energy gamma rays suggests that star formation in the universe reached its highest rate about 10 billion years ago. Researchers examined 740 space objects that produce high-energy gamma […]
Catalysis depends on the crystallographic plane of the catalyst
A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change. As the catalyst itself takes part in the reaction it may undergo a physical change. Hence, if catalysts take […]
Self-knotting bionic proteins
Author: Ivan Coluzza is an Ikerbasque Research Professor at CICbiomaGUNE
Some heteropolymers can be designed to spontaneously self-assemble in complex pre-determined knotted structures. In the past, we referred to such designable heteropolymers as “bionic proteins”. Here we present an extensive […]
The costs of going green
A tax on carbon emissions is an efficient way to make firms and consumers internalize the environmental costs due to climate change. However, there are many other aspects to consider in a transition from a fossil-fueled economy to a cleaner […]
MI weekly selection #307
Yellow band is Milky Way’s reflection on moon in new depiction
Milky Way radio waves can be seen as a bright splash of yellow reflected on the moon’s surface in a new image. Astronomers used data from the Murchison […]
Origin of the mysterious blue fluorescence of polymer carbon dots
A quantum dot is a nanometric crystalline structure of semiconductor materials. In a quatum dot electrons are confined in a region of space, thus creating a well defined structure of energy levels that depends very much on the size and […]