Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand and Charne Lavery, University of Pretoria On many beaches around the Indian Ocean, keen observers may spot bits of broken pottery. Washed smooth by the ocean, these shards are in all likelihood hundreds of years old, from centres of ceramic production like the Middle Eastern Abbasid caliphate and the […]
2020 has been all about Covid-19. Almost. Nature produced an excellent piece to review an extraordinary year: A review of 2020 through Nature’s editorials Quanta Magazine has produced a set of articles to remind us that science, in general, has not stopped: 2020 Biology: While the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the most urgent […]
How much are you conscious of right now? Are you conscious of just the words in the centre of your visual field or all the words surrounding it? We tend to assume that our visual consciousness gives us a rich and detailed picture of the entire scene in front of us. The truth is very […]
Wearable devices are attracting increasing attention. The most familiar today are smartwatches and smart bands. The sensors in these devices monitor vital signs such as our temperature, heart rate, and even blood oxygen, but are unable to address biochemical parameters. One of the main reasons is the relatively short life of chemical sensors and biosensors […]
Levant may have experienced tsunami 10K years ago Archaeologists examining sediment cores have found clues that a massive tsunami may have once hit the coast of the Levant about 10,000 years ago. The clues consisted of seashells within sediment cores they are collecting along a beach in Israel, which was much farther inland at the […]
An ancient legend from the Indonesian island of Flores speaks of a mysterious, wild grandmother of the forest who eats everything: the ‘ebu gogo’. According to folklore, such tiny, hairy people as her once roamed the tropical forests alongside modern humans, eating crops and sometimes even human flesh. For decades, ethnographers documented the tale, recording […]
The Pacific Ocean is the deepest, largest ocean on Earth, covering about a third of the globe’s surface. An ocean that vast may seem invincible. Yet across its reach – from Antarctica in the south to the Arctic in the north, and from Asia to Australia to the Americas – the Pacific Ocean’s delicate ecology […]
Ancient shipwreck offers clues about African elephants About 100 tusks found among the artifacts of a trading ship that sank in 1533 are giving researchers new insights into the African elephants that lived during that time, according to findings scheduled to be published in Current Biology. Conditions at the shipwreck site preserved DNA in the […]
DIPC Electronic Properties • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
Density functional theory (DFT) is a theoretical treatment of molecules in which the electron density is considered rather than the wave functions of individual electrons. In other words, it is a way of describing many-electron, in general, many-fermion, systems in which the energy is a funtional of the density of electrons (fermions). DFT is without […]
If you are a fan of the MARVEL universe, you will have noticed that many of its characters, such as Spiderman, Black Panther, Ant-Man or Wolverine, have superpowers based on the abilities of certain animals. Using the animal kingdom as a reference, and using the abilities of certain animals, is not something exclusive to comics […]