Article archives

Imaging technique gives scientists a look inside cat mummies The atomic number imaging technique is helping researchers see inside the mummies of cats from ancient Egypt without having to remove the wrappings. Scientists hope they can use the new imaging technique to learn more about human mummies. National Geographic Chunks of land along Calif.’s San […]

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. It is the most common reason for physician consultation in most developed countries and after disease/damage of the nervous system is predominantly treated with opioids. Opioids are medications that relieve pain. They reduce the intensity of pain signals reaching the […]

An atom in an excited state gives off energy by emitting a photon, a quantum of electromagnetic radiation, according to Bohr’s second postulate. Although Bohr’s specific model of the atom has been vastly extended and incorporated into models based on a different approach , this postulate is still valid. Atoms can acquire internal energy, that […]

In the first entry of this series I introduced the new research field of ‘plant neurobiology’, one of whose main sites is the Murcia University ‘Minimal Intelligence Lab’ under the direction of cognitive scientist and philosopher Paco Calvo. In that entry, I offered a brief sketch of the topics covered by the field, topics that […]

Unlike in perfectly competitive markets, there are many instances of economic situations in which selfish rational behavior does not imply an efficient allocation of resources. One example is the financing of a public good. Say some neighbors are asked to contribute to the construction of a park of one hectare (10,000 m 2 ) in […]

Birds’ small brains pack big neuron punch Birds’ brains may be small, but they pack more neurons related to intelligence than many mammals with larger brains Researchers used an isotropic fractionator to measure the number of neurons in regions of birds’ brains and found that many songbirds and parrots packed more neurons in their brains […]

A 1 million-year-old fire lit by human ancestors was discovered in 2012 in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. The soil of the cave yielded several dozen stone tools, microscopic plant ashes and burned bone bits. It is supposed that a member of the Homo genus, perhaps Homo erectus , made a fire that produced […]

The success of Bohr’s model of the atom in accounting for the spectrum of hydrogen left this question: Could experiments show directly that atoms do have only certain, separate energy states? In other words, are there really gaps between the energies that an atom can have? A famous experiment in 1914, by the German physicists […]

For a while, new evidence has been accumulating linking the gut microbiota to brain function. A new paper published recently in Cell Reports, shows that the intermediary is a type of white blood cell, evidencing as well the relationship between the brain and the immune system. While the crosstalk between the peripheral immune system and […]

For a great part of the past century bilingualism was believed to affect intelligence negatively . Jespersen, in 1922, claimed that “the brain effort required to master the two languages instead of one certainly diminishes the child’s power of learning other things.” Still, some people (wrongly) believe that children might get confused by exposure to […]