In 2000 and 2001, the use of child slaves on cocoa farms in West Africa was exposed in a series of documentaries and pieces of investigative journalism, sparking an international outcry . This series of events was far from unprecedented. As discussed in my paper, since the 19th century, when cocoa was first introduced to […]
It is said that music can appease the beasts, and every parent in the world has heard of the –unproven– Mozart effect for producing smarter babies, however, what not everyone knows is that one of his compositions, the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, can actually decrease the epileptic activity in the […]
Organic molecules detected in Curiosity collection A soil sample collected by the Curiosity rover at Bagnold Dune contained organic molecules, the first ever detected on Mars. Instead of dropping the sample into an empty cup, scientists decided to put the sample into a cup prepped with a chemical reagent, which revealed organic molecules not detected […]
Topological materials have special universal properties, which are protected against perturbations. The name comes from the fact that such properties are theoretically described by topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometrical objects that are unchanged by continuous deformations. Topological materials behave like an ordinary insulator in the bulk but have conducting […]
That collective decisions made through voting may lead to some weird consequences is something probably well known since the first time one tribe started to use some kind of voting in order to reach an agreement. Contrarily to what happens in many other areas of human wisdom, we don’t have any deep reflections on the […]
New look at fossils puts bryozoans in Cambrian Explosion Researchers reexamined ancient fossils with new technology to find that bryozoans, filter-feeding creatures that live in water like corals, were present during the Cambrian Explosion and describe their findings in Nature. The fossil, which is shaped like a honeycomb, was revealed in finer detail using micro-computed […]
Microscopy is a leading technology in biological research. Today, a typical microscopy session may generate hundreds to thousands of images, generally requiring computational analysis to extract meaningful results. But a simple analysis is not enough any more. Over the last few years, deep learning (DL) has increasingly become one of the gold standards for high-performance […]
We live in a world in which momentous decisions are made by people often without forethought. But some things are predictable, including that if you continually consume a finite resource without recycling, it will eventually run out. Yet, as we set our sights on embarking back to the moon, we will be bringing with us […]
It happens often. We see someone who reminds us of someone else we know, or we have met, but we cannot remember where, only the face is familiar. Whether there was a single cell in the brain responsible for familiar face recognition was a long-standing question in neuroscience. Now, it seems that those cells, which […]
Genetically edited pig kidney transplanted into patient The genetically altered kidney of a pig was transplanted into a brain-dead patient exhibiting signs of kidney dysfunction at New York University Langone Health with the consent of the patient’s family. The genes of the pig were edited to remove a molecule that can trigger immediate rejection. Reuters […]