Robots used to be restricted to heavy lifting or fine detail work in factories. Now Boston Dynamics’ nimble four-legged robot, Spot, is available for companies to lease to carry out various real-world jobs, a sign of just how common interactions between humans and machines have become in recent years. And while Spot is versatile and […]
As bea u tiful as it is, the natural world has always been a tough place to live in. Since their dawn, nearly 4 billion years ago, living organisms have faced a myriad of threats to their existence which have seen the majority of those who ever existed to perish. Only those organisms that managed […]
Packaging is essential to preserve the food quality and safety and to extend the shelf life of the stored product reducing the food waste. In this sector, plastics are the material of choice because they are cheap, lightweight and easy to process. The main requirement for packaging materials is to maintain the food in good […]
Scientific disinformation about climate change is having a great impact especially in countries like the United States (USA). Misinformation about this topic and about scientific issues in general, not only confuses the population and discredits scientific findings but also paralyzes evidence-based policies. Farrell et al (2019) provide a series of examples and strategies that can […]
The view of the horizon has always been of great inspiration for humans: that line, separating our Earth from the sky, appears so real. Looking at the Sea and its intersection with the sky, one can not avoid to wonder which things are still out of there to be found. A famous poem by Giacomo […]
Aristotle defined (fair) outrage as the pain that is experienced due to the fortune of someone who does not deserve it and he outlines that a man who is only rightly outraged is worth praising . However, if he described this outrage as fair does it mean there is another one that is unjust? In […]
Last February I published my first scientific article as principal author in Physical Review B . This article summarizes a big part of my work as a PhD student, a journey that has not been easy. The first version was sent to the journal a year ago; in between many things happened: new experiments, discussions […]
On our unique planet, life evolved under the pressure of natural selection. The evolution theory of Darwin demonstrates the incredible plasticity of the living organism. For millions of years, living organisms explored the conformational universe of proteins introducing new structures and function through genetic mutations. The genetic modifications are translated into the sequence of amino-acids […]
Technology by itself is not good or bad but it can be given good or bad uses and everything depends on the decisions made by the people who use it. One of the good uses of social networks is what some scientists are doing to create academic networks outside of their work, as well as […]
Zoë Firth & Priscila Borba Borges, students, European Master’s in Clinical Linguistics (EMCL+) and Adrià Rofes (advisor) ‘ I can’t control my brain’. So sang Weezer in their 2001 hit ‘Island in the Sun’; how fitting, then, that this was the song teenager Kira Iaconetti chose to sing during her brain surgery. That’s right: during […]