Competitive markets are efficient under a number of conditions. One is that the consumption or production of the commodity to be traded must not cause externalities. For instance, consider a group of firms polluting the atmosphere or the waters of a nearby river. The individual behavior is typically not sufficient to keep the pollution level […]
Originally, intellectual property legislation was created on the assumption that the profits derived from the monopoly of the patented inventions would encourage innovation and thus promote economic growth. This is one of many hypotheses that the vast majority of economists have ever considered as intuitive. Accordingly, it is generally believed that the patent system is […]
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Specially shaped snouts help seahorses sneak up on their prey Seahorses have a nose for prey; their unique snouts are shaped to create very little disturbance in the water, allowing them to stealthily pounce on their intended meal, according to a study published in Nature Communications. “The seahorse is one [of] the slowest swimming fish […]
Disruption of normal blood flow to vital organs such as the heart, lung, and brain is the main cause of death in adults in the Western world. Current therapies require hospital facilities, since clot-lysing drugs are administered systemically or through a catheter placed within the obstructed vessel. Besides, the doses are limited by the potential […]
Both thermodynamics and quantum mechanics are very important theories, but they are applicable to very different kinds of systems. Thermodynamics describes macroscopic systems where the number of particles is huge (around Avogadro’s number: 6.022×1023). On the other hand, quantum mechanics describes the behavior of microscopic particles. The regimes where these two theories can be applied […]
In this second part of the series about ITER (see first here), we start giving a more detailed description of the ITER machine. Then, we address some important challenges that have been identified for each of its parts and scientists’ plans to solve them. Tokamak design After all, the core of a nuclear plant is […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Strawberry poison frogs pass on chemical defense to offspring Strawberry poison frogs provide chemical defenses to their tadpoles by feeding them eggs spiked with alkaloids. Researchers measured alkaloid content in the frogs during different stages of development, separating them into two groups — one in which tadpoles were reared and fed by their mothers and […]
A lot of ink has been wasted in the last decades discussing whether string theory is a good description of nature or merely a mathematica construct with no connection at all with reality. However, the answer to this question actually lays at least in the middle of both options and for sure not any close […]
In the basement of the Prado Museum, Madrid, there is a small yet astonishing group of fresco paintings that do not receive as many visitors as other masterpieces of the collection. They were painted in the 11th century by an anonymous mozarab artist and configure a set of hunting scenes and wild animals. One of […]
Talking seems easy to us, so much so that we take it for granted, but the cognitive machinery responsible for this capacity is extremely complex. Among the many cognitive processes involved in speaking, people who know more than one language face an added challenge: they not only need to ensure that the words they select […]