Every year, as the International Women’s Day approaches, a classic topic for the media is to summarize statistics related to the gender wage gap . The empirical evidence is overwhelming: differences between men and women in the labor market are persistent in all countries. If we look at Europe and US data in recent years […]
Can you name a polygonal feature in any of the Solar System atmospheres? None? Up to our current knowledge there is only one: Saturn’s Hexagon. Not only it is the one and only of its kind but it is also the longest-lived planetary-scale atmospheric feature in any planet. A recent paper by Agustín Sánchez-Lavega and […]
Localization, or knowing “where am I” is a central topic of research in mobile robotics today, and it has been like that for more than 30 years. One cannot conceive ordering a futuristic personal assistant robot “go to the coffee machine and bring me a large one” if the robot is unable to know where […]
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Irradiated scrap metal helps researchers recreate a supernova Scientists have simulated a supernova with the help of some radioactive waste and a particle accelerator at CERN. Researchers took leftover irradiated scraps of metal containing titanium-44, which is made naturally by supernovae, to produce a beam and sent it into a chamber filled with helium to […]
In the last days there has been an important breakthrough in physics and particularly in cosmology due to the publication of the results of the BICEP2 collaboration on the measure of certain polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) we refer to as B-modes. These modes are thought to be sensible to the density of […]
One of the most classical problems in philosophy is the existence and nature of free will. Though the growth of our scientific knowledge about the brain, and about the universe in general, is making the notion of ‘free will’ less and less tenable, it seems that the major difficulty becomes to reconcile this idea with […]
One of the most important features of thermodynamics is that it has improved human quality of life amazingly during the last centuries. Since in 1606, the Spanish inventor Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont patented the first steam engine a great effort has been done in developing new and better thermal machines. Internal combustion engines, heat […]
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Salamanders may be getting shorter due to climate change Appalachian salamanders have gotten shorter in the past 50 years, possibly adapting to warmer, drier weather conditions. Researchers compared specimens they collected with those collected by museums from the same areas since 1957. They found that each generation of salamanders in several species grew 1% smaller […]
Is there anyone that doesn’t know the sport of curling? Just in case: curling is a winter sport played indoors where two teams take turns sliding rocks on ice, trying to place them as close as possible to the button, a target area of four concentric rings placed about 30m away. One curler delivers the […]
Supernovae are one of the most fascinating events in stellar astrophysics. Most stars suffer explosions at some point of their last days but the most massive ones explode releasing incredible amounts of energy and rivaling in brightness with the rest of the galaxy they live in. What they leave behind is hydrogen enriched with materials […]