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New fabric may increase access to water in deserts A team of scientists say they’ve created a piece of fabric that can collect water from fog and release the liquid when conditions are warmer. Researchers coated a piece of cotton fabric with the polymer PNIPAAm, creating sponge-like material. The fabric could be used to increase […]

Olfaction is one of the most important senses. It protects us from eating spoiled food, it helps animals to detect their relatives, it makes the perfume business quite successful and, in general, it connects us to the volatile chemicals surrounding us. These chemicals, usually called “odorants”, can be detected even if they are in a […]

We will address a recent article by Jaillet and Porta (Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, IRI), which reveals new practical applications of highly-abstract mathematical entities. When it comes to robots, we can’t forget that their fundamental goal is always somehow related to moving stuff. Arm robots as those found in the automotive industries are […]

Quantum field theory has been the paradigm of modern physics since it was formulated in the first half of the last century. It is based on the idea that everything in physics corresponds to the interaction of some fundamental fields that permeate all space and the excitations of which represent the particles we see in […]

Proteins perform most of the daily work of the cell, they catalyse most of the biochemical reactions, initiate and mediate the electrical signals in our neurons and form an important part of the structure of our bodies. Formed by up to several thousand amino acids (from a set of 20 different types) chained one after […]

The wave nature of light expresses itself in the propagation all over space, showing an intrinsic limitation to be localized beyond the so-called diffraction limit which is of the order of half the wavelength of the photons propagating. However when interacting with matter, light often gets reflected, diffracted, scattered or absorbed depending on the interactions […]

Electronics on paper At the moment the costs are still too high for them to be used in things like business cards or package labels, but remarkable advances in materials science and simpler fabrication methods are setting the stage for a whole new breed of cheap, bendable, disposable, and perhaps even recyclable electronics. And some […]

A translucent material allows light to pass through, but if we try to look an object behind such a material, the image will appear blurred or distorted. Think, for example, of the semitransparent glasses commonly used as showers screens. The reason why the image deforms when passing through the glass is the scattering of light […]

Neurons in your brain are interconnected through synapses, thus constituting the so-called neural networks. Following a simplified but conceptually useful view, each synapse can be seen as a “link” between two given neurons, and it has a certain associated strength. Such a strength gives an idea of how reliable a given synapse is in order […]

In addictions the first and toughest step is admitting our fault. The same applies in science: assuming our ignorance pushes us beyond the starting line, ready to delve into the unknown. So when in May 12th, 2008 a devastating earthquake struck the Sichuan province in Southwest China -labeled as ‘moderately quiet’ in terms of seismicity- […]