Australia bushfires create their own weather Australia’s bushfires are creating their own weather in the form of pyrocumulonimbus clouds, which generate massive thunderstorms capable of starting more fires. “These fire-induced storms can spread fires through lightning, lofting of embers and generation of severe wind outflows,” Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said in a tweet. Insider Bears’ […]
The cerebral cortex is a limited resource. Evolution has employed some impressive tricks to increase the amount of cortex available, such as folding it, therefore getting more surface in the same volume, or putting different things in the left and right hemisphere instead of duplicating them, thus enlarging its capacity to accommodate specific functions such […]
NY forest fossils date back 386M years The 386-million-year-old fossils of trees found in New York’s Catskills are likely the remains of the world’s oldest forest. Researchers found the remains of three different types of trees in what is now a quarry. New Scientist Ancient seawall finally gave way to rising waters A seawall dating […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
Nonlinear processes are attractive in microscopy and spectroscopy since they can be excited with light in the near‐infrared, which offers several advantages, from a deep tissue penetration capability or a reduced photodamage due to the lower photon energy, to a spatially more confined probed volume, which can result in an improved lateral resolution. These processes […]
An invasive species can be any kind of living organism—an amphibian (like the cane toad), plant, insect, fish, fungus, bacteria, or even an organism’s seeds or eggs—that is not native to an ecosystem and causes harm. They can harm the environment, the economy, or even human health. Species that grow and reproduce quickly, and spread […]
Despite creative efforts to tackle it, belief in conspiracy theories, alternative facts and fake news show no sign of abating. This is clearly a huge problem, as seen when it comes to climate change, vaccines and expertise in general – with anti-scientific attitudes increasingly influencing politics. So why can’t we stop such views from spreading? […]
Alternative explanation for landslides in Mars Long landslides on Mars may have been caused by vibrations of unstable light rocks at the bottom of the slide. The findings, which offer an alternative view to previous suggestions that the landslides were caused by underlying ice, could give researchers more insight on the landslide risks on Mars […]
We usually take for granted that aromaticity is something that belongs to the ground state of a molecule; but the fact is that nothing forbids aromaticity appearing in an excited state. In the same way that molecular properties are largely affected by the ground-state aromaticity, excited-state aromaticity can guide the understanding of excited-state processes, the […]
Wouldn´t it be great to have a drug that could kill specifically our old damaged cells allowing us to have a better health at an advanced age? But we are not talking about a dreamed magic immortality pill. Senolytic drugs, compounds that kill senescent cells, are already a reality and represent a new concept that […]
No matter how elegant your theory is, experimental data will have the last word. Observations of the retrograde motion of the planets were fundamental to the Copernican revolution, in which the sun replaced Earth at the centre of the solar system. And the unusual orbit of Mercury provided a spectacular confirmation of the theory of […]