Galaxy photos from Hubble feature merger, 3-armed spiral NASA has released the latest images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope since mission scientists repaired a major computer glitch that hobbled the spacecraft on June 13. The images, which haven’t been colourized, show the merger of a pair of galaxies and an unusual spiral galaxy with […]
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the genetic material of most living organisms, being a major constituent of the chromosomes within the cell nucleus and playing a central role in the determination of hereditary characteristics by controlling protein synthesis in cells. DNA is, thus, a nucleic acid composed of two chains of nucleotides in which there is […]
One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer. They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms […]
“ Any being, if it varies however slightly in any manner profitable to itself… will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.” ― Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) , The origin of species […]
Coral cells are seen merging with algae Researchers have observed the merging of coral cells enveloping algae at the start of their symbiotic relationship for the first time. “We were able to directly observe the interactions and symbiosis with video and confirmed what we saw by preserving the cells in plastic resin and taking semi-thin […]
Specialisation has necessarily led to the fragmentation of knowledge, creating loosely connected disciplines in which discoveries in one area are hardly known in others. This implies that the flow of knowledge is severely restricted among disciplines or even among different areas within the same discipline. In recent decades, different approaches have been proposed to overcome […]
The cryptocurrency bitcoin now uses up more electricity a year than the whole of Argentina, according to recent estimates from the University of Cambridge. That’s because the creation of a bitcoin, in a process called mining, is achieved by powerful computers that work night and day to decode and solve complex mathematical problems. The energy […]
An earworm is a melody that arises spontaneously in the mind, perhaps after having heard it only once, and gets “stuck” in the head for hours or days. It is also called brainworm, catchy music, repetition of musical images, involuntary musical imagery and stuck song syndrome. We may come to feel that the tune is […]
Ancient star yields new idea about origin of heavy elements A magnetorotational hypernova explosion, rather than a neutron star merger, probably created SMSS J2003-1142, an ancient star in the halo of the Milky Way, according to David Yong and Gary Da Costa, who published their team’s findings in Nature. “[N]eutron star mergers, together with magnetorotational […]
Tetrapyrroles,“the pigments of life”,are key molecules for the metabolism of living organisms, supporting functions of vital importance such as electron transport, light-harvesting and oxygen reduction. Within this family of compounds, porphyrins are organic pigments characterized by the possesion of a cyclic group of four linked nitrogen-containing rings called porphyrin, the nitrogen atoms of which are […]