Nowadays, there is a growing demand for new biosensors capable of detecting specific molecules, contaminants or toxic substances in food, drinking water, air, blood and so forth, with a high degree of sensitivity and specificity. Furthermore, we preferably want these biosensors to be inexpensive, easily reproducible and with a rapid and accurate response. This demand […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Poor Math Skills Make a Mortgage Default More Likely Unprecedented numbers of American subprime mortgage holders began defaulting on their loans in 2006, precipitating two years later the most severe global recession since The Great Depression. Pundits have offered numerous theories about what started the mortgage mayhem, but firm evidence has remained elusive. According to […]
Biomedicine • Materials • Neurobiology • Physics • Physiology
Human brain has about 85 billion neurons. Each neuron forms thousands of chemical and electrical synapses with other neurons. To record the synaptic activity of each neuron in the brain an intracellular probe with a millivolt scale is required. Glass electrodes are widely used, but they are fragile and they have high impedance. An intracellular […]
Seed germination can be defined as the restart of growth of the embryo of the mature seed. Germination depends on the same environmental conditions as vegetative growth does, water and oxygen must be available, the temperature must be suitable and there must not be inhibitory substances present. However, it is common that even in favorable […]
Saturn is truly a weird place. Apart from having quite a peculiar thermal history and one of the most interesting satellites in the Solar System, this planet displays arguably the most fascinating meteorological phenomenon ever seen. Suppose for a moment that next spring a storm raises in your hometown. Nothing unusual to care about, probably […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Violence against women at epidemic proportions Three in ten women worldwide have been punched, shoved, dragged, threatened with weapons, raped, or subjected to other violence from a current or former partner. Close to one in ten have been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner. Of women who are murdered, more than one in […]
Decision making in areas such as production planning, distribution and grid management, logistics or financial portfolio management is usually based on mathematical models, mathematical optimization themselves. Let us assume that we have to take a decision of how many units to produce of two products A and B. The production system is common and has […]
We shall close with this entry our series (I, II, III) about the origins of Islam, indicating some further interesting facts about the Qur’an. 4) By Muhammad’s time, the Arabic alphabet contained no marks for vowels; furthermore, some groups of consonants were written with exactly the same character (e.g., the symbols for sounds b, t […]
Entanglement is a fundamental tool in quantum computing and several quantum information protocols, such as quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution. The basic unit of entanglement is the entangled bit ( ebit ), represented by a maximally entangled state of two qubits (quantum bits). Entanglement can also be implemented in a higher dimensional […]
A complex myriad of factors, many of them related with the global economic crisis, have given rise to a large number of social movements in the latest years. From the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring, or the more recent Turkish protests, most of these phenomena share a notorious fact: having the social networking and […]