Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by a spirochete, a bacterium, Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum . The main route of infection is by sexual contact but is also transmitted from the mother to the newborn in what is known as congenital syphilis. If syphilis is left untreated for years the treponema may invade the […]
Another distant planet suspected to be in Kuiper Belt Another planet, in addition to the so-called Planet Nine predicted last year, may be circling the sun in the Kuiper Belt. Researchers detected something between the size of Earth and Mars causing a warp in the orbits of asteroids, comets and dwarf planets within the Kuiper […]
The idea that certain natural products such as rubber are composed of giant molecules, or polymers, consisting of many repeating units linked by covalent bonds arose largely from the work of the German chemist Hermann Staudinger (1881–1965) in the early 1920s. He convinced skeptical chemists of this idea partly by linking small organic molecules (monomers) […]
After all those big discoveries of the latest years (LIGO’s gravitational waves, or NASA’s TRAPPIST system, for example) I felt the need to explain how normal everyday astrophysics is dealt with. To explain the little things behind any discovery, and the scientific journey between seeing something odd in the sky and explaining it with science […]
The analysis of armed conflicts between countries has a tradition in Game Theory, starting with the classical models for the battle of the Bismark Sea by Haywood (1954) and for the nuclear conflict in the Cold War by Schelling (1960) . More recent analyses focus on the uncertainty of the specific destruction capacity of one […]
Genes’ intron retention may be behind sex reversal in reptiles at high temps Australian central bearded dragon embryos, which under normal temperatures would hatch as either male or female, all hatch female regardless of their chromosomes when exposed to high temperatures, raising concerns that climate change could result in a change in the sex ratio […]
There are compounds, called isomers, that have the same molecular formulae but different molecular structures or different arrangements of atoms in space. In the so-called cis-trans isomerism, isomers have different positions of groups or specific atoms with respect to a double bond, a ring or a central atom. For example, the numbers in the name […]
Juvenile delinquency is a serious and common problem but not hopeless: it has been on the decline for a number of years, yet, juvenile courts continue to assess millions of cases per year. There are times when this subject seems hopeless such as when we read about a horrendous crime committed by a minor. The […]
After centuries of debate, there is no agreement about whether ‘knowledge’ must be essentially conceived as a cognitive state of individual minds, or must be attributed to some collective entity, i.e., whether it’s me , or we , who ‘really’ knows. A promising analytical approach to this problem has emerged in recent years, which is […]
Streaks shooting out from Mars impact craters likely caused by high-speed winds Some impact craters on Mars show evidence of wind streaks likely caused by high-speed sideways vortices rolling away following the impacts. “These have tornado-like speeds but do not go straight up; instead, they are horizontal, like a tornado on Earth turned on its […]