In recent years, when I enter into a bakery my decision of which bread to buy is getting more and more complicated because of the high variety of bread available. Bread is “in appearance” a simple product just made out of flour, yeast and water mixed together and baked. Of course, the complexity of bread […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Evidence of plague found in Bronze Age skeletons DNA testing of Bronze Age skeletons has found evidence of a plague outbreak that occurred thousands of years before the Black Death that devastated Europe in the 1300s. Researchers found enough Yersinia pestis DNA in skeletons that tested positive for the bacteria to produce complete genome sequences […]
As everybody knows, the people from Bilbao are born wherever they want. And, according to one of the most captivating conjectures in contemporary archaeology, this might have been so in a totally unexpected way even from many millennia ago. The conjecture I am referring to is the ‘Solutrean hypothesis’ about the first human population of […]
Imagine you want to study the biology of an animal that no one has been able to capture. First, you devise a way of trapping it, then a method of calming it down so that you can manipulate it. This is exactly what David Wineland did, but his long-sought prey was not an animal, but […]
An «earworm» is a tune that arises seemingly spontaneously in the mind and becomes “stuck” in the head for hours or days. It is also called brainworm, musical imagery repetition, involuntary musical imagery, and stuck song syndrome. Sometimes we feel that it is driving us insane hampering a straight thinking and complicating concentration although usually […]
“‘Is there no way,’ said I, ‘of escaping Charybdis, and at the same time keeping Scylla off when she is trying to harm my men?’” -Homer, The Odyssey Conventional cost-benefit studies are based on marginal analysis. A decision to undertake a project should be made if, with respect to the actual situation, it provides more […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Still trying to make sense of New Horizons’ Pluto data Pluto’s frozen mountain ranges Norgay Montes and Hillary Montes are among many of the dwarf planet’s features described in the first published study of data gathered so far from the close flyby of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July. The mission scientists acknowledge they still […]
Why some people believe in ghosts, haunted houses, or telepathy, while others remain skeptical? This question has been present in the scientific literature for decades and still remains unanswered. Research has discarded several candidate causes for this difference, such as deficits in intelligence or lack of reasoning skills . According to our current scientific knowledge […]
The field of electronic transport through nanometer-scale systems, such as molecular junctions or atomic wires, has been an extremely active area during the last decades. The effect that the development of a post-silicon era might have on our daily lives, together with the existence of a number of extremely interesting scientific and technological open questions […]
We devoted the first part of this article to introducing the problem of motion planning for autonomous vehicles at a qualitative level and to briefly describing two of the most commonly-used algorithms, RRT and RRT* . Next, we will continue getting into deeper mathematical details about the topological structure of the state spaces associated to […]