Going through a break up is kind of traumatic. We all have felt it sometime, not only your heart is broken but your brain feels like out of sync and incapable of proper functioning. Well, this is not just an impression, new research has found there is a relationship between a broken heart and a […]
To date, more than 50 million people have been infected with the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and more than 1,2 million have died. It is a global problem, affecting everyone, but we are still learning how it infects, how it behaves, what causes harm to humans. The virus is spread by the droplets produced by an […]
New Horizons finds light in the darkness of space The New Horizons space probe, which has moved beyond its exploration of Pluto, has found evidence that space itself has its own glow. When researchers removed visible light sources from images of the open universe sent back from the space probe, now about 4 billion miles […]
Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), are strips of graphene with ultra-thin width (<50 nm). Graphene ribbons, introduced as a theoretical model by Mitsutaka Fujita and coauthors to examine the edge and nanoscale size effect in graphene, have emerged as a promising material for nano electronics, as they combine many of the extraordinary properties of graphene with a […]
We shall conclude with this entry our discussion of Plato’s view of science, the main conclusions of the two former ones being, in the first place, the idea that ‘scientific knowledge’ ( epistēmē ) consists in the knowledge of eternal, intelligible Forms, whereas material things are imperfect copies of the former, and only graspable with […]
The third person effect phenomenon was described by Davidson in 1983 . People tend to think that media influence other people more than themselves. This self reinforcement is a key mechanism to understand the different effects caused by the media on their audience, since people are motivated to maintain a positive image of themselves by […]
Social learning in otters Otters learn to survive by observing others in their social circles. The experiment with Asian short-clawed otters, in which the animals learned to open containers filled with meatballs after watching their peers do it, “is the first to show evidence of social learning and long-term memory in Asian short-clawed otters,” says […]
If a nucleus has a non-zero spin, it behaves as a small magnet. Therefore, in an external magnetic field, the nuclear magnetic moment vector precesses about the field direction but only certain orientations are allowed by quantum rules. Thus, for hydrogen (spin 1/2) there are two possible states in the presence of a field, each […]
The concept of crystal is very old, and it is strongly related to symmetries. Basically, a crystal is a system with a repeated pattern through space. For instance, in ice the water molecules form a hexagonal pattern, giving rise to many different macroscopic forms. But, can it happen that a system presents a pattern not […]
Preamble In the period 2015-2019, I was hired as a mathematician by a biology department in order to perform a research that eventually would become my doctoral thesis. This text is adapted from the last chapter of that thesis, “Cycles and interactions: A mathematician among biologists” (full text available here ). The symbiosis between mathematics […]