Nowadays, central Australia is mostly a huge desert. It was not always like that: only five million years ago, this area had a completely different look, with humid forests, rivers, streams and lakes, a strong contrast to the current dry landscape. A significant portion of the Australian desert is, actually, full of water. Water that […]
Back in the decade of 1950, and inspired by the beauty of the formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics, carried out by Feynman among others in the first half of the twentieth century; scientists thought that all physics had to be invariant under three fundamental symmetries that could relate different physical processes between them. These symmetries were […]
In biology few issues are as basic as the division and classification of living things. Despite the differences shown by taxa that occupy each of the categories, all living things have a common ancestor and characteristics that unite them. Since Linnaeus (in 1735) to the newest division created by Cavalier-Smith (in the late twentieth century) […]
Nowadays there are quite a few compounds in clinical trials to assay their potential as breast cancer treatments. Some of them are the so called “PARP inhibitors”. These inhibitors work very well in tumours that have a deficiency in DNA repair because PARP proteins are involved in that process. However, a group of researchers working […]
The history of science is full of examples of researchers who arrived at the same discovery independently. Unfortunately, this still happens in this information age, thus technological deficiencies are not to blame for this lack of communication between different research communities. Odd as it may sound from outside, I hold that much of this isolation […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Three new primate species verified in Borneo A new small primate with a toxic bite and distinctive facial fur markings has been discovered in the jungles of Borneo. Two previously known subspecies of slow loris have also been accorded full species status. The slow loris (Nycticebus) is a primate genus closely related to the lemur […]
A study published last year in The Lancet showed that a daily dose of aspirin reduces the risk of dying from several types of cancer. According to the authors’ data, long-term daily intake reduces the probability of dying from solid tumours by more than 30%. These results are consistent with known effects of aspirin blocking […]
Where is the half of the ordinary matter in the universe not observed yet? Computer simulations of cosmological galaxy formation predict the existence of large intercluster filaments of hot and low-density gas, the so-called cosmic web. For the first time, ESA’s Planck satellite has observed one of such filaments in the merging cluster pair A399-A401 […]
Maybe you find interesting, as I certainly do, to read in the news that a new species has been discovered somewhere in the World. We recently witnessed the surprising and unusual finding of a new, beautiful monkey in Congo: the lesula ( Cercopithecus lomamiensis ), and you may also remember to read, even in the […]
The molecular base underlying neuronal processes is being constantly enriched by extended research focused on the investigation of mechanisms involving neurological pathologies. This broad field ranges from widely extended diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, to other less well-known, generally low-incidence neurodegenerative pathologies. However, one of the most challenging aims of modern neuroscience is the understanding […]