Imagine you’re standing near the edge of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, gazing out over the ocean, when the ice near you starts to melt very rapidly. A surge of meltwater flows into the ocean. Surprisingly, you watch the sea level fall – not rise. But why? When we think of sea level rise, we picture […]
Fossils reveal worm with toothed, retractable throat An examination of well-preserved fossils uncovered in the 1920s has found a previously unidentified species of 10-centimeter sea worm with rows of sharp teeth covering a retractable throat that it could throw out to catch prey. Radnorscolex latus likely became extinct 424 million years ago and was the […]
The urban heat island effect has become a critical issue in urban areas, intensifying heat-related problems and increasing energy consumption. Urban areas tend to experience higher temperatures compared to those of surrounding rural areas, this is known as the urban heat island effect. The elevated temperature in cities is primarily attributed to the high density […]
Modern physics suggests time may be an illusion. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, suggests the universe is a static, four-dimensional block that contains all of space and time simultaneously – with no special “now”. What’s the future to one observer, is the past to another. That means time doesn’t flow from past to future […]
Digital skills differ among individuals. This can be related to inequality of accessibility, affordability and/or availability of training resources that are necessary to participate in the digital world. These digital divides were even more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which there were school closures. On one hand, education systems were not prepared for a […]
I am these days reading the delightful (though at times quite demanding) Reviel Netz’s A New History of Greek Mathematics, and I have not resisted the temptation of sharing with you some of the many pearls it contains. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that it is not a mere ‘survey’ […]
Extinct Nile branch carried pyramid builders, material A now-extinct 64-kilometer branch of the Nile ran past the location of Egypt’s Great Pyramid and 30 other pyramids 4,700 years ago when construction began. The 0.5-kilometer-wide branch was discovered through ground-level geophysical data, electromagnetic tomography and ground-penetrating radar — plus the extraction of two cores of earth […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Quantum physics
The discovery of materials with topologically nontrivial electronic bands has led to high-throughput computational efforts that uncovered such bands in most known inorganic crystalline materials. Thus, in 2017, a team of researchers presented what they called Topological Quantum Chemistry (TQC), a new and complete understanding of the structure of bands in a material that links […]
In the era of big data, signal processing faces significant challenges in terms of capacity and energy consumption due to the torrent of data to process. With over 90% of data transmitted through light, optical signal processing may offer unprecedented speed and energy efficiency compared to its electronic counterparts, as it operates without the need […]