Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Windbots for the exploration of gas giants NASA is looking to windbots to possibly explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, all gas planets that can’t be explored with a rover like those prowling Mars. NASA is financing research into windbots, which would catch a ride on the chaotic gases and gather information that way. Tech […]
The scientific community, in their different fields and specialties, has made tremendous progress regarding human health and how we deal with all the maladies affecting mankind. Particularly in cancer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book entitled “The Emperor of All Maladies” summarizes in a marvelous way this notion. However, I am convinced that our struggle against cancer […]
We are all familiar with rust. Rust is an iron oxide, usually red, formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the presence of water or air moisture, and it is a clear sign of metal corrosion by oxidation. Oxidation is a ubiquitous phenomenon that proceeds via the electrochemical interaction of ambient oxygen molecules […]
Authors: Ana Martín-Sánchez is currently pursuing her PhD at the Department of Functional Biology and Physical Anthropology of the University of Valencia, Spain Carmen Agustín-Pavón is a lecturer and researcher at the Functional Neuroanatomy group of the Department of Medicine of the Jaume I University, Spain Motherhood is a vital and challenging job for most […]
The field of population dynamics lies between mathematics and biology. Its subject of study is the evolution of biological populations with time. The natural language for dynamical problems is that of differential equations, and population dynamics is not an exception to this rule. Such a powerful tool was well known since the times of Isaac […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Ancient tooth shows signs of early dentistry One of the first examples of dentistry has been found in an ancient molar. Researchers say the 14,000-year-old tooth had been infected and was partially cleaned using flint tools. It predates any undisputed evidence of dental and cranial surgery, currently represented by dental drillings and cranial trephinations dating […]
The European Association of Environmental and Resource Economics has awarded its 2015 Erik Kempe Award to Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls, Laure B. de Preux, and Ulrich J. Wagner for their research “Industry Compensation Under Relocation Risk: A Firm-Level Analysis of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme,” published recently in the American Economic Review. I summarize their […]
The current in a semiconductor consists of two parts: the negatively charged electrons in the conduction band and the positively charged holes in the valence band. Although the number of electrons in the conduction band is equal to the number of holes in the valence band, the two contributions to the current are in general […]
Fernando Nottebohm was born in Buenos Aires in 1940, a second generation Argentine. Animals fascinated him since he was a child and he always wanted to understand how birds sing. After moving to the United States, he began to investigate the bird behavior and he found, using unilateral denervation of the syrinx, song handedness, i.e […]
Organic small molecules are essential for many different fields, from medicine to technology: Most of the drugs we take, biological probes and the constituents of solar cells, to name but a few, are small organic molecules. (Figure 1) However, their synthesis in the laboratory is not easy. Individual reaction conditions for each step of the […]