Article archives

Bilinguals and the theory of mind

Bilinguals and the theory of mind

NeurosciencePhilosophy of sciencePsychology

By José Ramón Alonso

Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, knowledge, etc.— to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that may be different to ourselves. Attributing thoughts to others allows one to predict or explain their actions, and to posit their intentions. It enables one […]

MI weekly selection #218

MI weekly selection #218

Weekly Selection

By César Tomé

New species of ghost shark with buckteeth found A new species of bucktoothed ghost shark has been described in Zootaxa. Hydrolagus erithacus is dark-colored, has a large head with big teeth and measures about 3 feet, or about 1 meter, long. Live Science Magnetic fields of stars close to our galaxy’s black hole amplified Stars […]

Pain lessons, by the Naked Mole Rat

Pain lessons, by the Naked Mole Rat

Neurobiology

By Sergio Laínez

Nature is one of my favourite places to look for scientific-related answers. As life did start roughly three billion years ago, it has been encountering endless difficulties that needed to be solved in order to prosper. To make things even more complicated, living organisms had to get adapted in multiple different ways because of the […]

Medical marijuana. Really?

Medical marijuana. Really?

HealthMedicine

By José Ramón Alonso

Marijuana is a preparation of the Cannabis sativa plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug, medicine and more rarely as religious or spiritual ingredient. It includes the dried leaves, flowers, stems, and seeds from the hemp plant. Its main active component is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC); one of 483 known compounds in the Cannabis plant, including […]

MI weekly selection #217

MI weekly selection #217

Weekly Selection

By César Tomé

Hydrogen transformed into metal under extremely high pressures Hydrogen has been pressed into a metallic form using extremely high pressures. Researchers squeezed the hydrogen between two diamonds in a special apparatus. The New York Times Chimera embryos developed in sows for 28 days Human stem cells injected into pig embryos created chimera embryos that developed […]

Simulating particle physics in a quantum computer

Simulating particle physics in a quantum computer

Computer scienceParticle physics

By Daniel Manzano

Particle physics is an interesting and complicated field of study. Its theoretical framework, the Standard Model, was developed during the second half of the twentieth century and it opened he possibility to explaining the behavior of the basic blocks of the Universe. It also classified all the particles, from the electron (discovered in 1897) to […]

Graphene nanopore DNA sequencing

Graphene nanopore DNA sequencing

BiochemistryChemistryCondensed matterMolecular biology

By Francisco R. Villatoro

Nanopore DNA sequencing was one the ten scientific breakthroughs of 2016 highlighted by Science magazine. In principle, graphene is the perfect pore material for DNA sequencing . Its monoatomic thickness of 0.35 nm is similar to the DNA base spacing and graphene nanopores can be fabricated with a diameter of only 1.0 nm, about the […]