Since the cells were discovered with the advent of the microscope in the late seventeenth century, scientists have tried hard to find out what is going on into them. An avalanche of techniques and technologies emerged over the course of decades slowly discovering important molecular features of the cellular world to our knowledge and our […]
The lymphatic system performs important immune functions, and runs parallel to the blood circulatory system to provide a secondary circulation that transports excess interstitial fluid, proteins and metabolic waste products from the systemic tissues back into the blood. For centuries, it was thought that the central nervous system lacks a lymphatic drainage system and the […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Polar winds found on Saturn’s moon Titan Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, has polar winds that take gases from its atmosphere and throw them into space, very much like Earth’s polar winds, according to data collected by the Cassini space probe, which has been studying Saturn and its moons since 2004. Space.com Supermassive black hole’s […]
In Economics, there is a number of what may be called equivalence theorems. They indicate how two seemingly different economic mechanisms are equivalent in most or all of their consequences. Typically the equivalence may be established under certain conditions that are considered general enough for the theorem to be relevant. Perhaps the oldest and one […]
No matter how the layout of the periodic table may be, there are elements that are always grouped together. This is easy to understand; let’s take for example the standard form of the table (due to H.G. Deming). In this layout each group, each vertical column in the table, has more significant periodic trends than […]
The Penrose–Hameroff theory of orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) claims that quantum computations in the brain account for consciousness . The communication among neurons by the secretion of neurotransmitters is based on synaptic vesicles distributed along their axons. The neuronal cytoskeleton has a key role in the dynamics of these vesicles. In the 1990s, Stuart […]
As we have discussed in our previous post, there is an important debate in the scientific community regarding the existence of negative absolute temperatures. The debate is not over, and both sides have valuable arguments, but in any case, one thing has already been proved. If negative absolute temperatures are real, the requirement to achieve […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Saturn’s massive, invisible outermost ring Saturn’s invisible outermost ring is even larger than scientists thought and made mostly of tiny particles. NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has helped researchers get a better look at the Phoebe ring’s enormity since it can only be seen as a faint halo at infrared wavelengths. Los Angeles Times Colossal […]
Photoreceptor degeneration is one of the most common causes of partial as well as total blindness. However, one of its “positive” -or at least, not so negative- characteristics is that, while light-sensing photoreceptor cells in the surface of the retina are damaged, the inner retinal cell layers and the central visual pathways remain intact over […]
Graphene is a material with outstanding electronic characteristics. Many of them arise from the cone-like dispersion of charge carriers near the Fermi level (at which the occupation probability of energy levels is 0.5), where electrons behave as relativistic Dirac fermions, i.e., as if they had no mass. This excellent video from toutestquantique.fr summarizes them very […]