While waiting to board a plane on a recent trip out of town, an airline staff member asked me to momentarily take off my face mask to allow the facial recognition technology to check me in to expedite my boarding process. I was taken aback by the bluntness of the request — I did not […]
For the intellectual history of our century, one of the most important books published in 2021 will probably be David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity , a monumental description of the evolution of the first human societies and of our understanding thereof. The book is conceived as […]
Stars born from black hole seen in dwarf galaxy A supermassive black hole has been observed helping to create newborn stars in a dwarf galaxy about 34 million light-years from Earth. The stars in Henize 2-10 were seen linked to a huge gas jet coming from the black hole by the Hubble Space Telescope. Live […]
A cement is any of various substances used for bonding or setting to a hard material. A popular one, Portland cement, is a mixture of calcium silicates and aluminates made by heating limestone (CaCO3) with clay (that contains aluminosilicates) in a kiln. The product is then ground to a fine powder. When Portland cement is […]
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. Vaccination is one of the topics vulnerable to online disinformation. Although opposition to vaccines has existed since they became widespread in the 19th century […]
Once upon the time, or to be precise between 200 and 150 000 years ago, the incipient humanity was struggling with climatic conditions in its land of origin, Africa. A long glacial era, M2 , had made it difficult to find food. And, although to what extent the population was reduced to a few hundred […]
Fossil dating method points to earlier human emergence Humans were likely around about 36,000 years earlier than previously though. Researchers calculated the age of fossils found in Africa using the single crystal argon-argon dating method, analyzing pumice and ash left behind by ancient volcanic eruptions upon which the fossils were resting. Inverse Supernovas responsible for […]
Any person with some basic knowledge of chemistry is familiar with the concept of electrolysis, i.e., the production of a chemical reaction by passing an electric current through an electrolyte – a liquid that conducts electricity as a result of the presence of ions. It has found major applications since the early days of modern […]
“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 […]