Organisms lived on Earth 3.5B years ago Organic matter dating back 3.5 billion years has been identified in stromatolites first discovered in Australia in the 1980s. “The organic matter that we found preserved within pyrite of the stromatolites is exciting; we’re looking at exceptionally preserved coherent filaments and strands that are typically remains of microbial […]
Quantum simulators—systems that can be engineered and manipulated at will—are useful platforms for verifying model Hamiltonians and understanding more complex or elusive quantum systems. The ability to trap and control particles with the help of well-controlled electromagnetic fields has led to revolutionary advances in the fields of biology, condensed- matter physics, high-precision spectroscopy, and quantum […]
The Mars 2020 rover mission is the next step in robotic exploration of the Red Planet. Unlike Curiosity, Mars 2020 will try to find answers to key questions about the potential for life on Mars, seeking signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life […]
We started this series discussing the basic ingredients of the Universe: events, spacetime, causality. In the last chapter , we introduced massive objects (and thus, matter), which appear as a generalization of the so-called photon box. As it moves, any object traces a path. Physicists call it worldline . We established that a massive object […]
Altered Ebola virus induces immune response in monkeys Researchers found that exposure to a slightly altered Ebola virus induced an immune response in monkeys that protected them from the parent virus. The goal is to produce a drug that knocks out the VP35 protein in the Ebola virus, although researchers cautioned that it may not […]
The concept of mean free path is very simple and straightforward: the average distance travelled between collisions by the molecules in a gas, the electrons in a metallic crystal, the neutrons in a moderator, etc. Assuming a couple of things about, for example, how elastic collisions are, it is not difficult to arrive to formulas […]
Strategic decision is the object of study for Game Theory, a discipline that started officially with the book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern . For non-cooperative games, i.e., games in which individuals make decisions individually and with no strings attached, the book was restricted to zero-sum […]
Good news everyone! A newly discovered type of hepatic cell might hold the key to repair all those old fatty livers without needing a transplant. And not only those but also those of people suffering from side effects of medication, cancer etc etc But let’s try not to get ahead of ourselves. A team of […]
Hubble snaps stunning photo of Saturn Saturn and its rings shine in an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and released by NASA and the European Space Agency on Thursday. The image, taken on June 20, also shows four of Saturn’s moons: Enceladus, Mimas, Janus and Tethys. Space.com Assessing the long reach of microplastics […]
Cortical neurons often fire together as a group, rather than independently, and these coactive groups, also known as neuronal ensembles (or chains, assemblies, attractors, clicks, motifs, songs, bumps, etc.), could constitute emergent functional units of the brain, as modular building blocks of memories, thoughts, motor programs, computations, or perceptual or mental states. In order to […]