It seems to be useful to begin this short article with the following quote: ¨ with courageous simplification, one might assert that the chemistry of the last century was largely the chemistry of covalent bonding, whereas that of the present century is more likely to be the chemistry of noncovalent binding¨. There are different terms […]
It has been a long time since we have learned that “going nano” leads to new properties arising from matter. One of those size-dependent properties that promises huge benefits due to its potential applications is magnetism. Magnetic materials are classified according to their susceptibility to magnetic fields into diamagnetic, paramagnetic and ferromagnetic materials, the first […]
Questions on the digit expansion of mathematical constants, such as , , or have fascinated mathematicians for centuries. However, many of these questions remain elusive to the efforts of researchers. For instance, it is not known for sure if the number 1 appears infinitely often in the decimal expansion of . Among the most remarkable […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
The beringia standstill hypothesis A review of genetic evidence suggests that the Native American founding population lived in Beringia for thousands of years before migrating south into North America. And sediments taken from the Bering Sea show that at the time, the region also had woody plants for building fires, and grassland steppes where woolly […]
If we were to ask a bunch of science geeks about their favourite animals, I have no doubt that the mantis shrimps would top many rankings. The mantis shrimps (or stomatopods) are an order of marine crustaceans, typically inhabiting the colourful coral reefs in tropical or subtropical seas. They are neither shrimp nor mantis, although […]
Curiosity has been studying the surface of Mars since its landing on August 6, 2012, at Gale Crater. One of its primary goals was to determine Mar’s habitability, present or past, as written in the geology of the red planet. For doing so, and after not a little debate, the landing site was selected to […]
I will end this survey of the main contributions to the economics of scientific knowledge (ESK) by discussing the works which attempt to offer a more or less systematic conception of the process of scientific discovery; in this entry, I will talk about ‘institutionalist’ theories, i.e., those that abstain from using mathematical models. The first […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Beluga whales infected with cat parasites Parasites known to infect cats have been discovered in Arctic beluga whales. Toxoplasma gondii can cause people to go blind. Scientists have issued a health advisory for those in the Western Arctic region who eat beluga meat. BBC News Higgs boson bubbles sent shock waves throughout nascent universe Bubbles […]
The relative wage of high-skilled to low-skilled workers began to increase in US manufacturing industries in the late 1980s, and this phenomenon was also observed in Mexico. At the same time, the US–Mexican trade as a percentage of US GDP increased dramatically during the same period. Does this mean that trade is behind the observed […]
Competition, evidence suggests, is a constant in nature. Looking from the largest to the smallest structures that Mankind has been able to observe, one can easily find examples: in clusters of galaxies (in which sometimes galaxies compete with each other to pull in the matter from their outer regions), stars (like binary systems with planetary […]