Kelp forests thriving in Patagonia’s cool waters Large kelp forests are thriving and healthy in Patagonia, according to a study the region’s cold spells are maintaining the 200-year-old forests along the coast of the southern end of South America. Researchers studied roughly 40 years of surface temperature data taken along the coastline and found that […]
An atomic projectile colliding with a surface at kinetic energies in the thermal or hyperthermal range interacts with and is reflected by the electronic density well in front of the first layer of target atoms, and it is generally accepted that the repulsive interaction potential is proportional to the density of electrons extending outside the […]
Humans are unrivalled in the area of cognition. After all, no other species has sent probes to other planets, produced lifesaving vaccines or created poetry. How information is processed in the human brain to make this possible is a question that has drawn endless fascination, yet no definitive answers. Our understanding of brain function has […]
This column seems to be gaining a new subcategory, which we could name ‘Wokism as the latest historians’ epidemic’ or something like that. I have already written a couple of reviews of recent books that tried to awaken us from our outdated, Eurocentric, rationalistic and neoliberal assumptions about the essence of history (Graeber’s and Wengrow’s […]
Milky Way’s closest quasar brimming with radio emissions Using a newly developed technique known as “self-calibration,” a team of Japanese astronomers has captured revolutionary photos of the closest quasar to the Milky Way, revealing a soft band of radio emission in the quasar’s galaxy. “By applying the same technique to other quasars, we expect to […]
For the past century, students of chemistry, materials science, and physics have been taught to model solid-state materials by considering their chemical composition, the number and location of their electrons, and lastly, the role of more complicated interactions. However, an international team of scientists has recently discovered that an additional ingredient must also be equally […]
Have you ever been in a situation in which irony was misunderstood as sincerity? For example, let’s say you’re at a clothing store with a friend of yours and you see a really ugly shirt on display. You say “Look! What a nice shirt!”. The next thing you know, your friend decides to buy you […]
How fast is evolution? In adaptive evolution, natural selection causes genetic changes in traits that favour the survival and reproduction of individual organisms. Although Charles Darwin thought the process occurred over geological timescales, we have seen examples of dramatic adaptive evolution over only a handful of generations. The peppered moth changed colour in response to […]
AI identifies viruses with high zoonotic potential Artificial intelligence identified viruses in the bunyavirus, rhabdovirus, filovirus and flavivirus families as the viruses most likely to spill over from animals to humans, and the platform may help researchers better estimate risks of zoonosis within viral families. The computer model also identified the Amazon River basin as […]
Nanothreads are one-dimensional nanomaterials composed of a primarily sp 3 hydrocarbon backbone, typically formed through the compression of small molecules to high pressures. In 2015, it was found that the slow room-temperature compression of benzene produced crystalline, one-dimensional polymers composed of diamond-like bonds. These diamondoid materials that border nanotubes and polymers are predicted to possess […]