The progress that physics experienced during the 20 th century was probably one of the greatest and most everlasting successes of the humankind. Discovering the hidden and minute composition of matter and energy, as well as realising that the rules they obey are as further from common sense as quantum theory has revealed, are amongst […]
Author: Nicola Molinaro is an Ikerbasque Research Fellow at BCBL – Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language Research on language comprehension has always underscored the speed and precision with which the brain integrates and process the input while at the same performing multiple parallel tasks. This extreme efficiency is explained by the ability of […]
Sea-level rise may spell doom for salt marshes in southeast England Salt marshes in southeast England could start to disappear beginning in 2040 due to sea-level rises. New Scientist Large, dark sarcophagus found in Egyptian tomb A large, dark sarcophagus has been found in a tomb in Alexandria, Egypt, alongside the bust of a man […]
Atom scattering at low energies has a long history as a useful probe of surface properties. The most common atomic projectiles are helium atoms formed into a monoenergetic beam directed toward the surface with energies in the thermal range, meaning kinetic energies less than 100 meV. From ordered surfaces the scattered spectra consist of sharp […]
Little children with autism have more lead and less zinc and manganese than children of the same age without autism. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications and has been carried out by a team from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) […]
Author: Teresa E. Gimeno is an Ikerbasque Research Fellow at The Basque Centre for Climate Change One of the expected effects of rising atmospheric CO 2 concentration in the atmosphere is an increase in plant water use efficiency. This is due to the expected enhancement of photosynthesis under future atmospheric CO 2 concentrations, together with […]
Uncertainties added to equation for alien life New research has included uncertainties of numbers in the equation used to determine how widespread alien life might be throughout the galaxy. “We can show that, given current scientific uncertainty, we get a distribution that could make both the optimists and pessimists happy at the same time: a […]
Many methods can be used to synthesise non-molecular inorganic solids. Some solids can be prepared by a variety of routes but others, especially those that are not thermodynamically stable, may be much more difficult to prepare and may require special methods. Non-molecular inorganic solids can also be prepared in various forms, as fibres, films, foams […]
From nucleic acids to proteins and sugar chains, all life is made up of polymers, large molecules made up of sequences of small units called monomers. However, how these macromolecules first appeared on the surface of Earth is still controversial. It is generally assumed that, right before life started, our planet was covered in very […]
Each of the Voyager probes, two unmanned spacecrafts launched in 1977, has a gold-plated audio-visual disc, a recording that aims to introduce us to a possible alien and to show the diversity of living beings and cultures that planet Earth has. Carl Sagan said that «The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only […]