Undoubtedly, the most popular aspect of driverless cars, autonomous drones and quadrotors are the cool videos we are getting accustomed to seeing around. However, behind each of those spectacular demonstrations there is a large amount of work, both practical and theoretical. In this series of articles we will shed some light on one of the […]
As the search for renewable energy sources has intensified, the discovery of efficient and cheap technologies for exploiting the energy from the sunlight has emerged as a key challenge. Higher efficiency plays an increasingly important role in making competitive solar cell designs as the price of silicon continues to drop. At present, the actual silicon […]
Lithium-ion batteries are widely used in portable electronic devices and electric vehicles since their introduction by Sony in 1991. Safety is an important concern since about two billion cells are produced every year but with a one-in-200,000 failure rate. Excessive temperature variations and high temperatures over the melting point of the metallic lithium can cause […]
As we saw in the previous entry of this series, skepticism had a relatively minor role during the development of medieval philosophy, with the main exception of the interesting possibility of interpreting the Pseudo-Dionysius as a skeptic about our knowledge of the nature of God (not, of course, of its being… save for ‘being’ being […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
New mathematical definition may help identify chaos A new mathematical definition looks to describe the potential for chaos. The theory is roughly based on something akin to entropy, the degree of randomness within a system. “You could say you have chaos if you have exponential growth of uncertainty. That could happen in relatively simple systems […]
We are all familiar with the equation of ideal gases: PV = nRT. To deduce this equation, an ideal model of the gas is considered. In this model, gases are composed of particles so tiny compared to the volume of the gas that they can be considered zero-volume points in space, and there are no […]
Laziness, sloth or indolence is, depending on who you ask, a sin, a psychological characteristic, or a basic human right. It is usually used as a pejorative and is considered a disinclination, a personal choice where one the lazy person decides not to carry out an activity despite having the ability, the time […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Scientists in Antarctica find evidence of neutrinos’ existence The existence of cosmic neutrinos has been confirmed by scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. Researchers combed through years of data collected by sensors buried in the ice and pinpointed 21 ultra high-energy muons created by rare neutrino interactions with other particles. They say the […]
¨The chemical bond¨ is one of the most often used concepts in chemistry. It is also one of the eldest terms since the first definition of chemical bond comes from the studies of G.N. Lewis who published his classical paper on interactions between atoms in 1916 . Lewis stated that ¨ we shall say that […]
One of the first things that we are taught in school is that living things are born, grow, reproduce and die. We can think of aging as the line that connects these events, lifespan as the length of that line and senescence as the step that goes from reproducing to dying. The three terms bring […]