Japan is known to be one of the world technological leaders. Having to import many of the raw materials and fuels its industry needs, it has been basic research and the development of technologies based on it what have transformed Japan in a window into the future. An important part of that future is based […]
Our universe is not stable according to the currently measured values of the top quark and Higgs particle masses. There is a non-null probability that at any instant in the next billions of years the present “false vacuum” will change to a “true vacuum” by quantum tunneling, destroying all matter, energy and spacetime without any […]
Researchers seem to be reassured and perhaps compete in remarking the complexity of their own topics of study. We language scientists, however, can sit back and let our topic do the talking. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are, broadly, the super-cogs in the language machinery, each recruiting a set of brain systems in […]
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A predicted collision between pair of black holes The prediction late last year of a collision between a pair of supermassive black holes in a galaxy about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth has gotten support from a new study by scientists at Columbia University. Last year, scientists noticed a flickering pulse from the galaxy’s quasar […]
A Spanish folk saying goes “ mujer que sabe latín no tiene marido ni tiene buen fin ,” which may be translated as “a women who knows Latin can expect neither a husband nor a good ending”. The saying implies how difficult is has been traditionally for an educated woman to be accepted as a […]
Usually, the concept of exciton is linked to that of nonmetallic crystal: an electron-hole pair in a crystal that is bound in a manner analogous to the electron and proton of a hydrogen atom. It behaves like an atomic excitation (hence the name) that passes from atom to another and may be long-lived. Exciton behaviour […]
Life is sustained by chemical reactions, and the countless reactions that take place in the cells of living organisms that are responsible for every biological process are known as energetic metabolism. Among the others, the brain stands as the most energy-consuming organ, accounting for up to 20 % of the body’s total haul while representing […]
Together with the discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation was probably the main historical factor in the (European) Modern Age. As we saw in the previous entry, the debate between different Christian denominations was a perfect breeding ground to put into use the recently rediscovered arguments of the ancient Greek Skeptics (though in practice the […]
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Could we instantly I.D. pathogens by their glow? It can take days to identify pathogens by swabs and cultures. A new technique uses spectroscopy to see immediately the light bacteria emit. Futurity Old, distant galaxy baffles scientists A galaxy described as the oldest and most distant to be observed has perplexed scientists, and may cause […]
Some decades ago, the American social scientist Donald T. Campbell imagined interdisciplinary research as a fish-scale structure according to which scholars should make an effort to create links between disciplines, spanning areas ignored by others, in an overlapping pattern aiming to cover the entire web of knowledge. He suggested that scholars should overcome the “ […]