At my workplace, we received recently a survey to measure our engagement at work. We were asked to evaluate different aspects of our daily job, such as the work atmosphere, productivity, performance…, and each question would accumulate points for our working team. For those items in which our team scored less, we were required to […]
Carbohydrates are molecules composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. They are formed of at least three atoms of carbon. Monosaccharides are the simplest carbohydrates and they cannot be hydrolyzed to smaller carbohydrates. Among the monosccharides we find glucose or fructoses which are formed of six atoms of carbon or glyceraldehyde which is composed of three […]
Nowadays we are getting more and more accustomed to making use of new technologies shortly after they have been developed. We like the idea of immediacy and our wishes coincide well with the commercial interests of industry. Nevertheless, there is a field in which this immediacy is almost impossible: the medical sector. Unfortunately, there is […]
Among all the molecules that constitute living organisms, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is probably the most popular and certainly it deserves the “molecule of life” surname. However, its role as the keeper of the critical information needed to construct an organism would be useless without the help of a very close relative, with a strikingly similar […]
During the last year, a longtime forgotten controversy was reactivated by a very interesting paper written by J. Polchinski and his collaborators, in which they questioned whether the so called black hole complementarity principle is a good solution to the apparent information paradox of quantum gravity. This is a question that attracted a lot of […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Malaria reduced by preserving biodiversity of forests Researchers at Brazil’s University of Sao Paulo found that malaria could be kept from spreading while still preserving the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. The traditional view is that clearing such forests curbed the spread of the disease. Using a mathematical model, researchers found that the parasite causing […]
That knowledge is valuable is just a truism within our ‘knowledge driven economies’, but it is not that (economic) kind of value what I will talk about in connection to knowledge. I want to introduce, instead, a current and vivid debate in an arcane corner of philosophy. It is a debate about the nature of […]
The organism that causes flu is the influenza virus. It belongs to the family Orthomyxoviridae and they are included in Group V of the Baltimore classification, consisting in negative sense, single-stranded RNA viruses. Within this family there are three genres that are responsible for the flu: Influenza A virus, Influenza B virus and Influenza C […]
Pele is the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. Pele’s hairs are thin strands of molten basaltic glass drawn out from lava, thrown into the air from lava fountains, lava cascades or vigorous lava flows, and spun out by the wind. Each hair-like strand has a diameter less than 0.5 millimeters and is as long as 2 […]
