“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch […]
mTOR has nothing to do with Norse mythology, it stands for “mammalian target of rapamycin” or “target of rapamycin in mammalian cells”. mTOR is involved in important cellular processes, including growth, proliferation, motility, survival, protein synthesis, transcription and autophagy. The history of rapamycin is so suggestive that I cannot avoid mentioning it: in the 1960s […]
Antiprotons appear to mirror their protons Protons and their antiprotons are mirror images of each other, according to Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment’s findings. The experiment made more than 24,000 comparisons of oscillations to precisely measure the charge-to-mass ratios. Science News Ancient black holes may be harboring dark secret Black holes that have been around since […]
For the first few million years of human evolution, technologies changed slowly. Some three million years ago, our ancestors were making chipped stone flakes and crude choppers. Two million years ago, hand-axes. A million years ago, primitive humans sometimes used fire, but with difficulty. Then, 500,000 years ago, technological change accelerated, as spearpoints, firemaking, axes […]
Since humans are not very good at predicting the future, even if the help of a magic ball, scientists have developed a new system based on artificial intelligence to help us predict the future risk of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease by analysing certain parameters in brain scans. The research, recently published in the journal Diagnostics […]
Trove of species discovered under Antarctic ice Researchers drilling into the ice of Antarctica have found close to 100 different species living in extreme conditions there. The little-known habitat is home to worms, bryozoans and other creatures that thrive in cold and dark conditions. Gizmodo Surface cooling may have carved Pluto’s unique landscape The weird […]
An atomic state in which two spin angular momenta of electrons cancel each other, resulting in zero net spin, is called a singlet. If the angular momenta combine to give a total non-zero spin, then that state is called a triplet. A triplet state usually has lower, sometimes substantially lower, energy than a singlet. Importantly […]
As you can imagine, a human intelligence test doesn’t really cut it for birds. It isn’t that easy to assess how an animal perceives information from the environment, processes it and decides to act. But researchers have developed a range of clever experiments to find out more about their cognitive abilities. Do they recognise each […]
Author: Marta Irigoyen is a postdoctoral researcher at CIC bioGUNE Since COVID-19 disease arrived in our lives at the beginning of last year, we are giving increased importance to our immune system status. We are worried about if it is working properly and can attack correctly the SARS-CoV-2. For this reason, lot of people are […]
170 new rogue exoplanets detected Around 170 free-floating exoplanets have been detected in the latest findings by a collaboration of astronomers around the globe. The rogue exoplanets were located around 420 light-years from Earth in the Upper Scorpius OB section of the Milky Way. Gizmodo Lifeforms may exist in Venus’s clouds Ammonia may counteract sulfuric […]