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 […]
Think about a laboratory animal. Have you drawn a mouse in your mind? Perhaps a monkey? I would bet that you had not thought about fish and even less about fish larvae. But, indeed, they are potential animal models for drug discovery, especially the Danio rerio species, better known as zebrafish . As you can […]
The last issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives published the article Is China Socialist? by Barry Naughton , which I summarize here. In order to address the question, the first thing Naughton does is to provide a working definition of socialism. Under a broad conception, a plausible socialist system would be judged on four […]
Signs of organic material spotted on Ceres Evidence of the building blocks of life has been found on the dwarf planet Ceres. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has detected signs of organic molecules around the Ernutet crater. Los Angeles Times Radio receivers around the world linking up to see black hole Astronomers think they’re very close to […]
When we approximate two superconducting materials at low temperature, so that they are only separated by a very thin layer (less than 10 nanometres thick) of an insulating material, some new and very interesting electrical effects can be observed. If normal conducting metals are separated by such a barrier in that conditions it is possible […]
Amputees are people that have had a limb removed by trauma, medical illness, or surgery. In this latter case, it is used to control pain or a disease process in the affected limb, such as malignancy or gangrene. Nevertheless, most new amputations occur due to complications of the vascular system, especially from diabetes. It is […]
The direct search for dark matter has been a thriving experimental field since a couple of decades, and a new and promising experimental approach has been recently developed and tested: the use of an atomic clock inner mechanics. This whole new idea seems to be relatively cheap since no huge technological development is needed, and […]
Thickness of Mercury’s mysterious water ice deposits measured Water ice on Mercury is about 50 meters thick on average, but there is some flexibility in that number and exactly where that water came from remains a mystery. Researchers used data from the MESSENGER spacecraft’s Mercury Laser Altimeter instrument to reach their estimate. Seeker Parasite adds […]
Gold is the quintessential noble metal. Its lack of chemical reactivity, particularly to acids and atmospheric corrosion, together with is rarity and malleability make it the precious metal it is since ancient times. Today, if we go for a description of gold in a chemistry textbook, we find something similar to this: A soft yellow […]
When autumn arrives to temperate climate forests, deciduous trees lose their characteristic green tonalities and start showing a wide spectrum of new colours: yellow, brown, orange, red… Chlorophyll reabsorption takes place in the leaves and carotenoids, present in a lower concentration, are exposed. These pigments are produced in all photosynthetic organisms, fungi and non-photosynthetic bacteria […]