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As the top atomic monolayer lifts a few Å off the underlying bulk Au (111), ab initio electronic structure calculations show that for gaps >1.5 Å, visible light squeezes inside the empty slot underneath, giving optical field distributions 2 Å thick, less than the atomic diameter. Considerable attention has been paid in the past decades […]

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is the most common acute leukemia in adults and a common pediatric cancer. Most often, AML develops from cells that would turn into white blood cells. AML is divided into different subtypes based on the cell type and maturation stage. Currently, monocytic AML, including acute myelomonocytic leukemia (M4) and acute monocytic […]

Collisions of high energy particles produce “jets” – quarks, antiquarks, or gluons moving through the quantum vacuum. Due to the confinement property of strong interactions, quarks are never directly detected but instead fragment into many secondary particles. Scientists have long expected that as jets propagate through the confining quantum vacuum, they will modify that vacuum […]

Source: Zhang et al. (2023) Despite their importance in our daily lives, we do not give much importance to our hands or feet, and even less at how they came to be. Even if roughly known, the process of human limb development had never been observed at single cell level resolution. Recently, Sarah Teichmann and […]

Invasive ants disrupt hunting by lions in Kenya Invasive ants have disrupted interspecies patterns in Kenya, triggering a drop in the number of zebras killed by lions. As big-headed ants spread in East Africa, they kill native acacia ants, which leads to the destruction of whistling-thorn trees that lions use as cover when hunting. Full […]

Magnetic two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors have attracted a lot of attention because modern preparation techniques are capable of providing single crystal films of these materials with precise control of thickness down to the single-layer limit. It opens up a way to study a rich variety of electronic and magnetic phenomena with promising routes towards potential applications […]

Author: Ramón Muñoz-Chápuli has been Professor of Animal Biology in the University of Málaga until his retirement. He has investigated for forty years in the fields of developmental biology and animal evolution. On October 11th, I published an article on Mapping Ignorance about the microbial dark matter, the vast diversity of microorganisms that cannot be […]

“Censorship” is not a pleasant word to anyone. Its connotations are almost always negative and, in the first instance, an effort should be made to find circumstances that justify a restriction of information. Even more so in the scientific field, where empirical evidence should prevail over authority, tradition, rhetorical eloquence or social prestige. Science seeks […]

Since more than a century ago, every generation has a moment in which religious believers experience an agonising urge to persuade themselves that the ‘truths’ of their religion are compatible with the sophisticate description of the universe that contemporary science is unfolding. Every now and then this leads to the landfall of some best-selling books […]

Researchers link reaction inside moon to unique rocks A reaction between magma and solids that occurred beneath the lunar surface 3.5 billion years ago may have created unique rocks now sitting on the moon. The rocks contain high levels of titanium, say researchers, who combined high-temperature molten-rock laboratory experiments with a close review of basalts […]