Poles are truly interesting places for planetary scientists. On Earth, the southern pole and its low surface temperatures sustain a polar vortex, most famous for the related hole in the ozone layer. On Saturn, for example, both poles have astonishing structures, including a hexagonal wave in the northern hemisphere. Not surprisingly, Venus also has something […]
The term reinforcement learning is well known among researchers in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It refers to a type of algorithms which are designed to solve a task by maximizing some kind of reward. In a simplified way, we could say that a typical reinforcement learning algorithm works as follows: our […]
If you have ever faced that thankless task of cleaning fish, for sure you will have realized, at least envisaged, the complex architecture of the fish’s natural armour. Fish scales play the role of a skeleton which provides both protection and flexibility at the same time. It goes without saying that this fact has not […]
Flowers are the reproductive organs of angiosperms (flowering plants) and flowering is therefore the phenomenon by which the undifferentiated cells from the meristems (similar to animal stem cells) differentiate into a floral meristem that will then produce the different components of the flower (sepals, petals, stamens and carpels). This transition from a plant vegetative to […]
Quantum computers are one of the most promising technologies under development, and all their promises are completely justified. Quantum systems are extremely expensive to compute, where “expensiveness” can be measured either by the memory or the computational time required in classical computers. But it should be much cheaper if the computer uses quantum mechanics rules […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Our metastable universe Under the simplest assumptions, the measured mass of the Higgs could mean the universe is eventually unstable and destined to fall apart. Scientific American Could flow batteries back up electric grids? To power flow batteries, two aqueous electrolytes held in different tanks are pumped through a membrane into a separate chamber, causing […]
The lungs of birds move air in only one direction during both inspiration and expiration through a set of tubular gas-exchanging bronchi called parabronchi. On the other hand, in the lungs of mammals and other vertebrates, air moves tidally into and out of terminal gas-exchange structures, called alveoli (Figure 1). The work carried out by […]
The genome is the text of life. Its ink is the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a heteropolimer of four nucleotides (guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine). It encodes the instructions to make work all known living organisms (and viruses). It was isolated at first in 1869 for Friedrich Miescher and at the early 50s of the 20 […]
The notion of ‘cause’ has a bipolar personality within the sciences. On the one hand, it is difficult to resist to the old Aristotelian dictum that real scientific knowledge (episteme) is knowledge of the causes; after all, one of the goals of scientific theories is to give explanations, and most people assume that to have […]
You’re sitting in a room with an all-southern view. Suddenly, a bear walks by the window. What color is the bear? Young Sherlock Holmes. Barry Levinson (1985) The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is one of the most unmistakable mammals of the planet. Its white fur is maybe the most straightforward reason for this distinctiveness, but […]