Superconductors are a particularly strange kind of metal. What makes them different is their behavior at very low temperatures – extremely low, that is, close to absolute zero. Basic thermodynamics dictates that in this regime we should expect all motion to cease, the constituents of the material being frozen at fixed positions. And with no […]
Altruism is a basic principle in many cultures and religions: do good deeds to other persons without expecting a reward or even if it is detrimental for you. However, it is not exclusive to human beings: ant workers abandon their own reproduction to serve the queen, vampires spit up part of the obtained blood to […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Scientists piece together what Milky Way might look like to outsiders Researchers have pieced together clues to conceptualize what our galaxy looks like from the outside. An artist’s concept shows the Milky Way’s four spiral arms. The Washington Post Friction all but disappears with new technique Scientists have created a technique that simulates friction down […]
Just as people constantly exchange messages via email, cells communicate with each other and their microenvironment by sending and receiving packages of information; and as we react in one way or another depending on the news we get, cells respond to the “message” by changing the expression of their genes. Following the analogy, in a […]
The exotic properties of layered materials have become a major focus of scientific research. The most famous member of this group is graphene which serves as a building block for few layered graphene and graphite as well as for single- and multi-walled carbon nanotubes. Here, each layer is an one-atom thick hexagonal sheet of sp […]
Perhaps you ignore that the most influential philosopher of the early Middle Ages did not really exist. This Zenoan paradox is explained by the fact that the writings of this philosopher were falsely attributed to a different, and much more authoritative person, and hence, after the counterfeit was established about one thousand years later by […]
The sci-fi thriller Ex Machina (2015), directed by Alex Garland, has put into limelight the problem of consciousness: whether a machine can spontaneously develop a mind, mental states, and consciousness. Everyone recalls that IBM’s Deep Blue beat the chess world champion in 1997 and IBM’s Watson won the quiz show Jeopardy in 2011. However, some […]
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Blobs ejected by black hole collide like billiard balls in Hubble images A black hole in the galaxy NGC 3862 has ejected two jets of plasma that knocked into each other like billiard balls, all caught in images by the Hubble Space Telescope over the course of 20 years. BBC Graphene discovery could lead to […]
The way we approach pain therapies doesn’t differ from the ones taken for other diseases. The aim is to look for molecular targets, which can be suitable for chemical intervention thoroughly assessing both efficacy and safety profiles for the drug, issues that are addressed throughout various stages of clinical trials. In the specific case of […]
In an electromagnetic wave, the direction of the electric field is perpendicular to the direction of propagation of the wave. We say the wave is circularly polarized if the tip of the vector that represents the electric field describes a circular helix (thus circular polarization is sometimes called helicity) about the direction of propagation. Waves […]