Article archives

Best sleeping position for your brain

Best sleeping position for your brain

Neurobiology

By José Ramón Alonso

Sleep has a critical function in metabolic homeostasis. Its restorative function may be a consequence of the enhanced removal of potentially neurotoxic waste products that accumulate in the awake central nervous system . The glymphatic system is a functional waste pathway involved in this clearance in the mammalian central nervous system. The pathway consists of: […]

MI weekly selection #152

MI weekly selection #152

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

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 […]

Did the first Americans come from Bilbao?

Did the first Americans come from Bilbao?

AnthropologyArchaeologyGeneticsHistory

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

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 […]

Earworms and chewing gum

Earworms and chewing gum

Psychology

By José Ramón Alonso

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 […]

MI weekly selection #151

MI weekly selection #151

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

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 […]

Do some paranormal beliefs develop from the experience of coincidences?

Do some paranormal beliefs develop from the experience of coincidences?

Psychology

By Invited Researcher

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 […]

A method to calculate elastic quantum transport at the nanoscale

A method to calculate elastic quantum transport at the nanoscale

Condensed matterMaterialsQuantum physics

By DIPC

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 […]