Gary Becker presented a first economic approach to criminal behavior. In a very standard neoclassical framework he studied this apparently non-economic problem. In particular, Becker assumed rational criminals responding to variables such as the probability of being caught, the severity of the punishment and the labor-market opportunity cost. After this seminal work, a large empirical […]
There is a word everybody fears and that is because when you listen to it out loud, it could be too late. Even though we have likely coexisted with cancer since complex multicellular organisms evolved, to us human beings, it just seems the number of cases keeps growing every year. Sadly, that seems to be […]
Drug-resistant bacteria’s origins traced back 450M years The drug-resistant bacteria Enterococcus may have evolved from an ancient gut microbe that lived inside some of the first creatures that walked on land about 450 million years ago. Researchers examined the superbug’s genetic history as well as its ability to survive in harsh environments and found that […]
We know that incident light can provoke a strong optical response in metallic nanostructures due to the excitation of resonant plasmonic modes, i.e, the electrons in the metal become excited by the photons in the incident light and oscillate collectively. Plasmonic nanoparticles can significantly modify the optical properties of nearby organic molecules and thus present […]
Sexual differences in the human brain, both in structure and function, have a high scientific interest and a clear social impact. In the biological part because of the different susceptibility of both sexes to some developmental disorders such as autism — four times more frequent in males than in females — , and also to […]
In our current understanding of the nature there still are some big gaps of knowledge that reminds us of the long journey ahead in physics. Here I will be talking about one of the great mysteries of our time in science, and the great endeavor taken by some of the most skilled people I’ve ever […]
Mature parasite living in fish eyeball helps host become easy prey for birds The parasite Diplostomum pseudospathaceum grows inside fish eyeballs and, depending on its age, either protects its host or compels the fish to become easy prey to birds. When the parasite is young, it wants its fish host to stay alive so it […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold–anodized aluminium plaques which were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 is intercepted by extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several […]
November 25, 1858, was a very cold day in Concord, Massachusetts. It was then that Henry David Thoreau discovered at Walden Pond some frozen fish he had never seen before, which were “shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch”, as he wrote the following day. “Are they not a new species?” he […]
Every organism, from virus to animals need nitrogen (N) to live; indeed, nucleic acids and proteins are made out with N. Nearly all of these organisms, fulfill their nitrogen needs taken up N from the environment in reduced forms, usually as nitrate (NO 3 – ), ammonium (NH 4 + ) or amino acids. Interestingly […]