Article archives

Capitanian event a mass extinction A group of paleontologists would like to add a sixth mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Capitanian age to the five generally accepted in science. Researchers have linked mass extinctions in China during that time period 260 million years ago with a major die-off in what […]

Intellectual protection via patents and copyright provisions, among other mechanisms, has been defended on the grounds that, without it, intellectual works would not be produced in the first place. Consequently, the monopoly granted by the patents or the copyright was considered a second best. This rational has been challenged in recent times, as it did […]

One of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, if not the greatest, was the transistor. It revolutionized the electronics industry and changed the way people around the world lived, learned, worked, and played. Its invention marked the beginning of solid state electronics which quickly reduced the size and power requirements of existing electronic tube […]

We, philosophers, tend to be more skeptical than the average person (though, if you know a little bit of the theories of some philosophers, I would understand that you take my claim with a grain of skepticism). In this series of entries, however, I will take you to a short visit to some of the […]

We all have listened about gene therapy, and for those who are old enough not in a good way, at all. Gene therapy became the most promising clinical therapy in the 1990s and this technology was meant to transform medicine. In essence, the concept of gene therapy is pretty simple: the introduction of an exogenous […]

Magnetic bands around sun may help predict solar flares Tracking the movements of traveling magnetic bands in the sun’s atmosphere may help predict solar flares, which can cause damaging power problems on Earth and wreak havoc on satellites, according to a study published in Nature Communications. Solar flares are at their worst when formed by […]

In lay people’s minds, railway lines are composed by rails and wooden sleepers on a bed of stones. These medium-sized stones are called ballast, and it is true that they are the most common material to lay the track on; at least when you are not building it in a tunnel or a bridge, where […]

A quantum dot is a nanometric crystalline structure of semiconductor materials. In a quatum dot electrons are confined in a region of space, thus creating a well defined structure of energy levels that depends very much on the size and shape of the quantum dot. This structure resembles that of atoms, that is why sometimes […]

Sensations which seem to come from limbs that had been amputated are called «phantoms». Most limb amputees report awareness of a phantom limb, i.e., the perceived presence of the missing arm or leg. Phantom sensations may also occur after the removal of body parts other than the limbs, e.g. after amputation of the breast, extraction […]

One of the main goals for anyone in the Academia, for any research group, is to publish the results of their research . Therefore, enormous amounts of time and effort are devoted to producing manuscripts which will be evaluated for publication in scientific journals or international conferences. Being this goal so central to the career […]