Article archives

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 […]

MI weekly selection #216

MI weekly selection #216

Weekly Selection

By César Tomé

Massive crack in Antarctic ice shelf grows The giant crack in the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica is continuing to grow, threatening to soon break off a large iceberg. The crack has grown about 6.2 miles, or about 10 kilometers, since the beginning of the year. BBC 3D-printed model helps researchers understand ancient portable […]

Columbus and the shape of the Earth, a “Holywood” story

Columbus and the shape of the Earth, a “Holywood” story

HistoryPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

It is said that Washington Irving’s biography of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828, was the work that started the legend that the discoverer of America was the person that convinced the ‘nearly medieval’ Europeans of his time of the sphericity of the earth, a legend that has captured the popular imagination since then. Nothing could […]