Spain, like many other countries with a large share of agriculture in the economy, faces significant challenges in managing the vast quantities of livestock manure produced every year. In 2020, Spain had more than 6.7 million cattle, each producing approximately 17 cubic meters of manure annually . Manure, particularly from large-scale livestock operations, creates environmental […]
The evolution of human starch digestion A gene that allows modern human mouths to break down starch into sugar likely mutated hundreds of thousands of years ago, say two papers that track the evolution of the salivary amylase gene AMY1 in great detail. A study in Science estimates AMY1’s first duplication was 800,000 years ago […]
Topological insulators are materials with special universal properties, which are protected against perturbations. Such properties are theoretically described by topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometrical objects that are unchanged by continuous deformations. Concretely, topological insulators are electronic materials that have a bulk band gap like an ordinary insulator but have […]
More than 6,500 volunteers have supported the accurate identification of approximately 1,000 prehistoric burial mounds in the Netherlands in just four months, proving the value of involving volunteers in archaeology. In 2018, the Heritage Quest project was launched to harness the power of citizen scientists, utilizing crowd-sourcing to identify archaeological features on lidar imagery of […]
One of the things the media present these days as one of the most important technological advances for the near future is what has come to be called the metaverse . The metaverse could be characterized by two fundamental properties. First, what is now offered to us through more or less large two-dimensional screens (ranging […]
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot oscillates in time-lapse images Jupiter’s Great Red Spot squeezes in and out as its movement speeds and slows, surprising scientists with its oscillating size. The paper puts together time-lapse footage of three months of observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and the insights could provide cosmic context for Earth’s hurricanes. Full […]
Author: Marc Zimmer, Professor of Chemistry, Connecticut College The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry recognized Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker for using machine learning to tackle one of biology’s biggest challenges: predicting the 3D shape of proteins and designing them from scratch. This year’s award stood out because it honored research that originated […]
The propagation of light -observed and governed since ancient times by simple lens construction- has long been described through classical geometrical optics. However, in particle accelerators we do not transport photons but beams of electrically charged particles subjected to repulsive forces that tend to unpack the particle beams. Optics of particle accelerators require electromagnetic lenses […]
A team of chemists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has succeeded in pulling an oxygen atom from a molecule and replacing it with a nitrogen atom. In their study, published in the journal Science, the group used photocatalysis to edit a furan in their lab. Ellie Plachinski and Tehshik Yoon with […]