Blindness is a world wide problem. As of 2012 there were 285 million visually impaired people in the world, of which 246 million had low vision and 39 million were blind. Most people with poor vision are in the developing world and are over the age of 50 years. One basic aspect for quality of […]
Everybody has heard about that. They say that plants are able to hear. Who has not ever heard from someone or read somewhere that talking to your plants makes them grow better and to be more splendid than if you treat them like a vegetable? You can believe it or not, but believer or skeptic […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
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 […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
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 […]