Imagine that we have a conductor or a semiconductor through which a current is flowing. Then we apply a strong transverse magnetic field. As a result, we can measure a potential difference at right angles to both the current and the field caused by the deflection of charge carriers by the field. This effect was […]
Educational attainment, the years a person spends within the education system, generates interest among scientists because statistical analysis shows that there is a relationship between that value and different aspects of life including income when adults, state of health and even life expectancy. Geneticists analyze trends that can explain variations within a population by exploring […]
Author: Elger Abrahamse is an Ikerbasque Research Fellow and staff scientist at the Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) Culture may be defined as the system of customs and beliefs that are deeply shared within a specific subset of the population. It includes ample behavioral scripts – informal guidelines about how to behave […]
Plastisphere studies reveal myriad microbes that may one day clean it up Oceanographer Maria-Luiza Pedrotti and her research team are studying the plastisphere — plastic waste and its byproducts — in the Pacific Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to identify the microbes that populate plastic and determine their biological activities to understand how they affect the […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Physics • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
The revolutionary theory of topological quantum chemistry , a description of the universal global properties of all possible band structures and materials, diagnoses topological phases based on elementary band representations. A set of bands is topological if it lacks an “atomic limit” that obeys the crystal symmetry (and time reversal, if desired): formally, an atomic […]
Author: Francisco J. Blanco is an Ikerbasque Research Professor at CIC bioGUNE Molecular interactions in cell membranes, particularly lipid-protein interactions in their hydrophobic core, are difficult to analyse and remain poorly characterised despite high relevance in physiological and pathological processes. Structural rearrangements in membranes and embedded proteins, and the way molecular interactions contribute to their […]
In this article I summarize the recently published paper by José Alcalde . In this article, the author discusses the current matching mechanism that is used in Spain to assign medical graduates who pass the MIR exam to residency positions. The system works as follows. Students are ranked according to their marks in the MIR […]
New map offers detailed view of Antarctica A new high-resolution map is giving researchers a much more detailed view of Antarctica. Images from the Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica, or REMA, will be made available for free to scientists studying the continent. The New York Times Ancient lava tubes may be behind unusual swirls on […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Physics • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
Chemists have a range of different spectroscopic techniques to study organic molecules. All of these techniques are based on spectra generated by a range of electronic transitions and vibrations, key excitations in matter, the study of which provides information about characteristics of materials and, therefore, allow their identification. In this context, one of those spectroscopic […]
“ It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present.— But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etc present […]