How fast is evolution? In adaptive evolution, natural selection causes genetic changes in traits that favour the survival and reproduction of individual organisms. Although Charles Darwin thought the process occurred over geological timescales, we have seen examples of dramatic adaptive evolution over only a handful of generations. The peppered moth changed colour in response to […]
Many parents feel guilty when their children play video games for hours on end. Some even worry it could make their children less clever. And, indeed, that’s a topic scientists have clashed over for years. In our new study, we investigated how video games affect the minds of children, interviewing and testing more than 5,000 […]
Machine-learning systems are increasingly worming their way through our everyday lives, challenging our moral and social values and the rules that govern them. These days, virtual assistants threaten the privacy of the home; news recommenders shape the way we understand the world; risk-prediction systems tip social workers on which children to protect from abuse; while […]
Plants that inhabit the Earth have the incredible ability to grow continually for hundreds of years, and always towards the light of the sun, which provides them with the necessary energy to sprout. At the source of this growth are changes in their environment, such as variations in light, temperature and humidity. But new stimuli […]
Blasting out Earth’s location with the hope of reaching aliens is a controversial idea – two teams of scientists are doing it anyway If a person is lost in the wilderness, they have two options. They can search for civilization, or they could make themselves easy to spot by building a fire or writing HELP […]
In 2021, an investment firm bought 2,000 acres of real estate for about USD 4 million. Normally this would not make headlines, but in this case the land was virtual. It existed only in a metaverse platform called The Sandbox. By buying 792 non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, the firm then owned the equivalent […]
Author: José R. Pineda got his Ph.D. from University of Barcelona in 2006. Since 2007 he has worked for Institut Curie and The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. Currently, he is a researcher of the UPV/EHU. He investigates the role of stem cells in physiologic and pathologic conditions. In a previous work Jenny […]
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the number of people studying Ukrainian on Duolingo, a language learning website and mobile app, has increased by more than 500%. Most of those who are taking up Ukrainian are probably unaware that there is a long-running controversy about this particular form of speech. One side views […]
Acute leukemia is characterized by the proliferation and accumulation of hematopoietic progenitor cells (which are able to differentiate to create specialized cell types) in the bone marrow that impede normal blood production. D epending on the cell population affected, it can be classified in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) and Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). ALL starts […]
Could it be that even our hands show traces of having evolved for violence? The unique structure of human hands has been extolled as marvelously adapted for precise control and tool use. But they may also betray in their proportions and structure having been selected for killing. This, at least, is a hypothesis posed by […]