Health • Medicine • Physiology • Psychology
gender gap Sleep experts recommend that adults sleep 7-9 h per night (7-8 h for older adults). However, about 30-35% of adults sleep less than 7 h and prevalence rates of short or insufficient sleep are increasing. Insufficient sleep is not in itself a diagnosable disorder; however, its high prevalence highlights a key target for […]
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has begun the study of one of the most renowned supernovae, SN 1987A (Supernova 1987A). Located 168,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, SN 1987A has been a target of intense observations at wavelengths ranging from gamma rays to radio for nearly 40 years, since its discovery in February […]
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. Cnidarians (corals, hydrozoans and jellyfish) are fascinating animals. Despite their primitive organization, lacking a brain or muscles, they are efficient predators of much […]
Human ancestors nearly went extinct a million years ago Humans almost faced extinction between 813,000 and 930,00 years ago when human ancestors’ population fell to about 1,280. Researchers studied the genomes of over 3,150 present-day people and found that human ancestors experienced a bottleneck for about 117,000 years, which may have driven the evolutionary divergence […]
Sahara Author: Evgenii Krestianinov, PhD candidate, Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University In May 2020, some unusual rocks containing distinctive greenish crystals were found in the Erg Chech sand sea, a dune-filled region of the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria. On close inspection, the rocks turned out to be from outer space: lumps […]
Social networks Author: Martha R. Villabona works at Subdirección General de Cooperación Territorial e Innovación Educativa of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, where she coordinates the area of multiple literacies. The American Psychological Association (APA) states that the use of social networks is either harmful or beneficial for young people . In […]
Just like our hands, certain organic molecules relate to each other like an image and its reflection – a phenomenon that chemists call “chirality” or “handedness”. The two mirror images of the same molecule, namely both enantiomers, often possess different biological properties. This is key, for example, for drug discovery, as many times only one […]
T-cell Author: Marta Irigoyen is a postdoctoral researcher at CIC bioGUNE T-ALL is an aggressive malignancy which results from the leukemic transformation of T-cell progenitors into tumor cells. It is widely accepted that complex interactions between T-ALL cells and their surrounding microenvironment contribute to disease and may regulate quiescence, survival and self-renewal of cancer cells […]
Reduced cancer risk tied to short bouts of physical activity A study found that a minimum of 3.4 minutes and 3.7 minutes of vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity per day were associated with a 17% lower total cancer incidence risk and 28% lower physical activity-related cancer incidence risk, respectively. Full Story: MedPage Today Polyethylene plastic […]
Phase transitions and their related phenomena lie at the core of modern statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. At equilibrium, an intriguing aspect of second-order phase transitions is that systems with distinct order parameters can be described by the same set of static critical exponents, a hallmark of universality. Thomas Kibble’s research on phase transitions […]