Article archives

Plasmonic nanostructures confine light to dimensions far smaller than the free-space wavelength, as they mix optical fields with electronic excitations. It was not until the 1990s, with the appearance of accurate and reliable nanofabrication techniques, that plasmonics blossomed. It was found then that local fields around nanostructures could be directly measured by near-field scanning optical […]

Finding patterns in a text could be very useful. It could reveal if the text has been written by a certain person or not, for example. Going a step further, finding sentiments in a text or a speech can also be very handy. These skills usually appear in procedural and spy movies and TV series […]

As readers of this blog will surely know, the economics of scientific knowledge is a topic on which I have worked extensively, and also written here not a few entries. Now I want to tackle a common objection to that field in itself: the idea that studying science “as if it were a market” commits […]

China shares photos from far side of moon China’s lunar mission has produced a number of photos from the far side of the moon. The images were taken by the Chang’e-4 lander and the Yutu-2 rover over the course of the last year. ScienceAlert New light on Vesuvius victims People who sheltered in boathouses in […]

Terahertz (THz) radiation is all around us. For example, this page emits blackbody radiation mainly in the THz region (defined here from 0.3 THz to 30 THz). Because terahertz radiation begins at a wavelength of around one millimeter and proceeds into shorter wavelengths, it is sometimes known as the submillimeter band, and its radiation as […]

Twelve years have passed since the world record for rail speed was set. “Operation V150”, which got its name from the target speed for its testbed trainset, 150 metres per second (540 km/h), occupied from January 2007 to April of the same year a team formed by the french railway operator SNCF, the infrastructure manager […]

Environmental problems and energy resources make it vitally important for the chemical industry to develop more sustainable and less polluting processes. Therefore, using solar energy is one of the most promising alternatives. If we take a look at Nature’s energetic profile, plants are able to use solar energy to convert it into chemical energy and […]

Meteorite likely chief cause of mass extinction The meteorite that struck Earth about 66 million years ago was likely the driving factor behind the extinction of the dinosaurs rather than extreme volcanic activity. Researchers examined deep sediments in the North Atlantic to create global temperature data and found that temperatures around the world at the […]

Symmetry is a unifying principle that governs all aspects of physics. The physical properties of crystalline solids are no different. But, as symmetry is progressively lowered through the 32 crystallographic point groups, novel transport effects emerge. Crystal symmetry dictates also the geometry of a phenomenon that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years […]

Families with members with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are easy prey for scam artists who offer them magical solutions and therapies not backed by science. Many of these pseudotherapies are included in the so-called alternative medicine, a misnomer because they are not medical treatments and do not meet the same criteria required of a medicine: […]