Creation of synthetic yeast genome nearly completed Scientists are close to creating synthetic yeast and could have it completed by the end of this year. The artificial genome has been completely designed and is about one-third complete, and once constructed, it could be used to make new biofuels, drugs and unique materials. Wired New radar […]
Beginning in 1928, Felix Bloch, an assistant to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, began to make some realistic assumptions in an attempt to formulate a more complete quantum mechanics of electrical conductivity. First, because he wanted to assign a definite momentum and energy to each of the electrons, but not a definite position or a time […]
Biology • Health • Physiology
If you have ever tried to lose weight by exercising you probably know is not that easy. However, you might be happy to know that the problem is not only a matter of motivation. It’s been consistently reported that the effect of exercise on weight is surprisingly smaller than what theory would predict. The reasons […]
One important principle of any sensible social epistemology is that the fraction of crazy-sounding ideas that are really crazy is extremely high. Of course, a lot of crazy-sounding ideas have turned out being right (e.g., the evolution of different species from common ascent, the earth’s being a planet turning around a star, the atomic composition […]
DNA-based computer could solve problems faster A theoretical DNA-based computer called a nondeterministic universal Turing machine could work out difficult problems faster than both conventional and quantum computers. The machine works by endlessly rearranging DNA via gene editing. New Scientist Temperature of Earth’s mantle recalculated Earth’s mantle is much hotter than researchers thought, coming in […]
During World War II the Germans relied on their strong chemical knowledge to overcome the limited access to critical raw materials that the circumstances of the war itself imposed. One of these raw materials was Chilean saltpeter (sodium nitrate), which was the base for explosives. The solution was to use a chemical process designed to […]
Deep in the ice below the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antartica, lies one of the great works that our modern civilization has produced. A kilometer and a half under the frozen surface there is a very special place for science and discovery. Darkness surrounds it but it’s able to see the entire cosmos. The […]
Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind and body characterized by altered consciousness, relatively repressed sensory inputs, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings. We spend around one third of our lives sleeping although why we sleep is still theme of debate. Sleep seems to assist animals with improvements in […]
Human gene expression still influenced by Neanderthal DNA Neanderthal DNA is still influencing the expression of human genes, affecting such things as the development of illnesses, height and immune systems. “Strikingly, we find that Neanderthal sequences present in living individuals are not silent remnants of hybridization that occurred over 50,000 years ago, but have ongoing […]
Common glass, used in windows or bottles, for example, is made by heating a mixture of calcium oxide (lime), sodium carbonate (soda), and silicon (IV) oxide (sand), resulting in a calcium silicate. This silicate is not a crystal but a solid in which atoms are random and have no long-range orderd pattern. These kind of […]