Astronomers may have observed black hole’s birth A strange blast approximately 200 million light-years away may have been the birth of a black hole. Astronomers first thought the blast, dubbed “The Cow” because its official name is AT2018cow, was from a black hole consuming a white dwarf, but “further observations of other wavelengths across the […]
In physics there are some well-known fictional characters: the experimenters Alice & Bob, Maxwell’s and Laplace’s demons, or some astronauts travelling at incredible speeds, to name a few. But the queen of them all is a cat. Yes, you guess right, that is Schrödinger’s cat. This cat first appeared in a thought experiment designed by […]
By the end of the first part of this series I listed the most important norms included in what Ian Jarvie calls Karl Popper’s ‘Proto-constitution of science’. Now I will start discussing several important problems of this Popperian rules. One first problem we can identify is whether Popper proposes these norms as just a suggestion […]
An allele is each of the alternative forms that the same gene can have. The alleles differ in their DNA sequence and can manifest in different results after expressing that gene, such as differences in the color of the eyes or in the blood group. Human beings are diploid, we have two sets of chromosomes […]
Photosynthesis fix may enhance food production Researchers are trying to replicate in food crops a change they made to tobacco plants that repaired a defect in photosynthesis in which plants inadvertently took hold of oxygen molecules instead of carbon dioxide, forcing the plant to use valuable energy clearing up that mistake. Researchers have tried to […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
You can read this article because I have used photonics in order to make it possible. It may sound futuristic, but photonics is a technology we use, one way or the other, on a daily basis. Photonic devices are analogous to those used in electronics, but with the electrons replaced by photons. Thus, photonics is […]
In spite of the title of his most important book ( The Logic of Scientific Discovery -LSD-, published originally in German as The Logik der Forschung , in 1935), Karl Popper’s fundamental claim about the rules of science is that they are not a matter of logic , in the sense that they cannot be […]
Shark tooth in pteranodon fossil suggests air-sea battle A shark tooth has been found embedded in the partial skeleton of a pteranodon that lived during the Late Cretaceous period. “We’ve got good direct evidence that a good-sized shark took a chunk out of a big flying reptile over 80 million years ago,” said Michael Habib […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
Some metals, alloys and transition-element salts exhibit a form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism. This occurs below a certain temperature, named after Louis Néel, when an ordered array of atomic magnetic moments spontaneously forms in which alternate moments have opposite directions. There is therefore no net resultant magnetic moment in the absence of an applied field […]
The share of the world’s population living below the global extreme poverty line has dropped from 42% in 1981 to 11% in 2013. This dramatic change has encouraged the UN to set the goal of ending it by 2030. Can it happen? In a recent article published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Page and […]