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 […]
When light encounters molecules, the predominant mode of scattering is elastic scattering (Rayleigh). This scattering is responsible for the blue colour of the sky, for example. It is also possible for the incident photons to interact with the molecules in such a way that energy is either gained or lost so that the scattered photons […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Imagine a very simple chemical estructure: 4 carbon and 1 nitrogen forming a ring, with no double bonds, just simple bonds between any two of them and with hydrogen. This compound is called pyrrolidine and is the base of very important biological and farmacological products. Pyrrolidine is found naturally in the leaves of tobacco and […]
Charles Lullin knew that the figures and people he was seeing were illusions. It was 1759, Charles Lullin was almost ninety years old and he had lost most of his vision: he was still able to distinguish some objects but he was not able to read or write. A servant used to read him the […]
Biochemistry • Chemistry • Condensed matter • Molecular biology
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 […]
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 […]