Article archives

Transcriptional noise seems to correlate with more closed chromatin environments.

Transcriptional noise seems to correlate with more closed chromatin environments.

GeneticsMolecular biology

By Daniel Moreno Andrés

I still remember the order and control exhibited by the chemistry of life that they explained to me in the early years of college. For me, the regulation of gene expression was the supreme paradigm of organization. The promoters, those regulatory sequences preceding genes, were unmistakable ports where plenty of proteins (transcription factors and polymerases) […]

Language evolution: The origin

Language evolution: The origin

Linguistics

By Pablo Bernabéu

1 Introduction Evolutionary linguistics encompasses the origins of language, the change within and across different languages, and the acquisition of language and languages by children and adults (Gong, Shuai, & Zhang, 2014). We shall start framing this voyage by looking back two centuries. Then, some theories of language origins seem to have displayed considerable ‘imagination’ […]

MI weekly selection #158

MI weekly selection #158

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

Universe isn’t a hologram, experiment determines A controversial experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found no evidence supporting the theory that the universe is a giant hologram. The Holometer searched for a kind of holographic noise using interferometers, but nothing has been detected. Science Sonic tractor beam developed A tractor beam that lifts […]

Flip me to the moon

Flip me to the moon

Mathematics

By David Orden

This post is dedicated to the memory of Professor Ferran Hurtado , inspirational friend and colleague. Triangulations are extremely useful in computer graphics, with terrain modeling being an outstanding example: A mesh of points in 2D is triangulated and then the triangulation is lifted to obtain an -monotone polyhedral surface in 3D, called a 2.5D […]

Clearly placed before the mathematical mind

Clearly placed before the mathematical mind

HistoryPhysics

By DIPC

We recently explored the concepts that Faraday introduced regarding the relationship between electricity and magnetism. In this article we focus on their treatment by Maxwell. The work of Oersted, Ampere, Henry, and finally Faraday had established two basic principles of electromagnetism: 1. An electric current in a conductor produces magnetic lines of force that circle […]

Having sex with another species

Having sex with another species

Biology

By Ignacio Amigo

Looking for a sexual partner outside your species is not very common, but that is what the males of a type of spider mite do. Even more, a recent work suggests that this kinky behaviour could have been key to colonization of new environments. Tetranychus evansi is a species of red spider mite originally from […]

Restoring my voice

Restoring my voice

Biomedicine

By Rosa García-Verdugo

One of the worst things that can happen to someone that loves talking as much as I do is losing my voice. What to most people is just a temporary inconvenience -or a relief depending on who you ask- for some is a real hindrance. Patients that suffer from a permanent impairment to their ability […]