Both the depletion of fossil fuels and the environmental concerns are a powerful drive for the development of sustainable routes to commodity chemicals. Lignocellulose, comprised of lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose, is the ideal candidate, but its inherent complexity hampers its transformation to value-added chemicals. The group of Katalin Barta at the University of Groningen has […]
Research in general, and mathematical one in particular, sometimes reminds to the lyrics that Cole Porter wrote for the Down in the depths song: And here am I Facing tomorrow Alone with my sorrow Down in the depths on the ninetieth floor. Nevertheless, sometimes you manage to get down in the depths and achieve a […]
Climate change disrupting lives of Europe’s bats The changing climate in Europe is affecting bats, disrupting their hibernation and hurting their ability to feed their offspring, which are being born sooner, according to researchers. BBC Studies describe “global road map of development” Using single-cell sequencing, researchers have mapped out the growth of individual cells in […]
Imagine a bucket filled with hard spheres. As these spheres are free to pack together as closely as geometry allows they tend to adopt a close-packed structure, a structure in which there is least unfilled space. X-ray diffraction studies reveal that many metallic elements have close-packed structures. This simple fact explains a couple of very […]
Author: Fernando Giraldez is currently Professor of Physiology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, and has a broad experience in teaching and research in Neuroscience and Developmental Biology. The view that music, maths and language are related is quite widespread. We know that they share common abstract properties and their associated skills and abilities […]
Astrophysicists from Yale University have recently claimed the discovery of a galaxy lacking dark matter . But, to fully understand (and assess) the excitement produced by this paper, let’s review a couple of things regarding dark matter and galaxies. In the current lambda-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) paradigm, the most accepted “theory to model the Universe […]
ESA’s Gaia mission releases 2nd data set on Milky Way observations Scientists are studying the latest data from the Gaia satellite, launched by the European Space Agency in 2013 to chart the Milky Way’s stars with great accuracy, in search of new discoveries about the galaxy. This is the second set of data received from […]
In ‘Chemistry Essentials for Dummies‘, John T. Moore writes: Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space. It can exist in one of three classic states: solid, liquid, and gas. When a substance goes from one state of matter to another, the process is called a change of state, or phase change. As he […]
In 1928, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience, wrote that the brains of adult humans never make new neurons. “Once development was ended,” he proclaimed, “the founts of growth and regeneration … dried up irrevocably. In the adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable. Everything must die, nothing […]
Reducing weight in all kinds of vehicles is currently one of the hot topics for Materials Science and Product Design. This goal is directly related to one of the grand challenges that society is facing, that is, mitigate greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions by reducing fuel consumption. Lighter vehicles consume less fossil fuels, which is definitely […]