Frog brain study looks for parenting clues Some poison dart frogs take an active role in parenting their young rather than disregarding eggs once they are laid, and researchers found brain regions in males and females that could offer clues about such behavior. Scientists compared neural activity in three species of poison dart frogs that […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
The so-called van der Waals materials consist of two-dimensional layers bound by weak van der Waals forces. After the isolation of graphene, the field of two-dimensional van der Waals materials has experienced an explosive growth and new families of two-dimensional systems and block-layered bulk materials have been created. This growth has been fueled mainly by […]
As one of those people who REALLY love to sleep -and doesn’t get close to enough of it- I am always interested to read on the topic. What I didn’t expect was to read about sleeping fish and how that relates to its origin . But let’s get down to the details, because if the […]
Pumping ocean water onto Antarctic ice sheet may save it Researchers say pumping massive amounts of ocean water onto the collapsing ice sheet in West Antarctica over a 10-year period may stabilize it and possibly prevent extreme sea level rise, but they also say such an effort would be expensive and could harm the area’s […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
For centuries, metals were employed in optical applications only as mirrors and gratings. New vistas opened up in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the discovery of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and the use of surface plasmon (collective electronic oscillations at the surface of metals) resonances for sensing. In a simplified picture and in […]
The cicadas are part of the soundtrack of summer. Their calls, especially if a large number of animals is gathered, can form an impressive concert. They are part of the hemiptera, the order of aphids and bedbugs, but they do not have the bad reputation of these others, although they are not beneficial either. The […]
Supermassive black holes heading for collision found A pair of supermassive black holes about 2.5 billion light-years away appear to be on a collision course with each other in a few more billion years, but astronomers say they can learn a lot about gravitational wave background noise now by observing them. Science Alert Ancient bird […]
Elements with 4f or 5f electrons in unfilled electron bands and their componuds , which have ions carrying magnetic moments but do not magnetically order, or only do so at very low temperatures, are generally known as heavy-fermion or heavy electron systems because the scattering of the conduction electrons with the magnetic ions results in […]
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have among their diagnostic characteristics problems for communication and social interaction. The typical example is the difficulty to understand the facial expressions or the body language of other people, but in addition to these aspects mediated by the visual system there may be other senses affected and, in fact, it has […]
Near-death experiences may be linked to REM sleep disorders Many people who report having had near-death experiences also report having had REM sleep disorder symptoms. REM is the sleep phase that features vivid dreaming, and researchers say a combination of the waking and REM states could be linked to the near-death experiences. Live Science Jellyfish-like […]