As more and more people around the world are getting vaccinated, one can almost hear the collective sigh of relief. But the next pandemic threat is likely already making its way through the population right now. My research as an infectious disease epidemiologist has found that there is a simple strategy to mitigate emerging outbreaks: […]
Depending on who we consult, we will hear quite a few opinions regarding what it is that motivates assassins. Let us sample some murder mystery writers. Agatha Christie mentions the passions of love, the lust for money, or the pursuit of some fixed idea. Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason detective novels […]
Black hole may not be at galaxy’s center There may be a fuzzy clump of dark matter, not a supermassive black hole, in the center of the Milky Way. Researchers say the dark matter could be made of fermions known as darkinos, which would possess milder gravitational forces that allow gas clouds like G2 to […]
Quantum objects are not abstract entities. On the contrary, they are quite real, As such, individual quantum objects can be detected, manipulated and their characteristics analysed using the appropriate techniques. Take the case of a single molecule adsorbed on a substrate. Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) would reveal electron densities of molecular orbitals, could be used […]
Astronomy • Biology • Microbiology • Physics
Authors: Predrag Slijepcevic, Senior Lecturer in Biology, Brunel University London and Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe, Honorary Professor, University of Buckingham Are we alone in the universe? The famous Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme has been trying to answer this question since 1959. American astronomer Carl Sagan, and many others, believed that other human-like civilisations must […]
Mitochondria are the energy-making machines in the cell. Also, since evolutionarily they are thought to evolve from symbiotic bacteria, they have their own little genomes, which are mainly evolved through the maternal side, and also maybe because of their important function, mutations in genes affecting them are very damaging, and even lethal. However, mitochondrial DNA […]
Scientists create beating heart organoids in lab Researchers have grown heart organoids in the lab using stem cells, and the small structures appear to beat. The organoids will be used to study how hearts develop and how defects might form. Live Science How brains could adapt to prostheses Researchers developed a third robotic thumb that […]
Terahertz (THz) radiation is all around us. For example, this page emits blackbody radiation mainly in the THz region (broadly from 0.3 THz to 30 THz). Because terahertz radiation begins at a wavelength of around one millimeter and proceeds into shorter wavelengths, it is sometimes known as the submillimeter band, and its radiation as submillimeter […]
Teeth play a central role in the ecology of most vertebrates – for catching prey, processing food and even attracting a mate. It’s no surprise that scientists such as ourselves have long been interested in how teeth first evolved. For many years we regarded shark teeth, with their conveyor belt system of tooth replacement, as […]
Just to take stock of what we have encountered in the previous entries of this series, regarding the ideas of contemporary philosophy of science than can find some kind of ‘ancestor’ in the works of ancient ‘philosophers’, we can mention Plato’s and Aristotle’s discussion about what are the essential differences and relationships between ‘scientific’ and […]