‘Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo’ José Ortega y Gasset (Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914) In my first article for Mapping Ignorance I stated that “destiny” was an unrealistic concept disproved by the scientific evidence. However, it could be possible that this is not completely […]
Every single day, the scientific knowledge of the biodiversity of the planet is increased with the description of new species. All of them are, in their own terms, valuable: a new piece in the puzzle of the history of Life on Earth. Most of the times, the new species can be easily classified together with […]
Bottles, bags, toys, clothes, prostheses… plastic is everywhere. Its global production has reached the quantity of 288,000,000 tonnes in 2012 . Day to day and year after year we only manage to get rid of a fraction of it by recycling, reusing or storing it in dumps but, sadly, some of that plastic ends up […]
Under the threat of those annoying genetic parasites called viruses, eukaryotic cells developed, on the top of a wide innate defence, a curious and efficient RNA-based adaptive immune system referred as RNA interference or iRNA. You will find more info about this surveillance system, which detects and destroys foreign RNA molecules entering the cell with […]
Bacteria are the workhorses for a large number of biotechnological processes. From different fermentation processes to insulin production, they are widely used in industry due to their efficiency, fast duplication times and ease of maintenance. But often their behaviour it´s much more complex than one would expect from a unicellular organism. This is where the […]
Modern societies are growing old and we should be proud of such great accomplishment. Substantial improvement in hygiene, health and nutrition has allowed mankind to even surpass a three-digit age. Leaving any further social consideration aside, seems obvious that life sciences will have to make a big effort to understand the so called healthy ageing […]
The idea of a living fossil is rather intuitive. We think that a kind of organism deserves that denomination if it has been living in the planet during a very large period of time apparently without any change. A well known example of living fossil is the Ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba) because, although it is […]
… if you want to want to be alive. The rock band Wilco already said it back in 2002 when they released the much-acclaimed album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. This simple statement found in one of the songs of that LP was able to summarise the paradoxical essence of life: death. But leaving any philosophical meaning […]
Although we assume evolution of complex life forms as a matter of fact, we must admit that our brains are not ready for such an odd concept. Even though we can slightly imagine what a million year means, when we finally stare at some amazing life beings, we cannot fully comprehend the changes needed over […]
A human body harbors around 37 trillion [1012] cells that came from a single fertilized egg by a process known as mitotic division or mitosis. While the first cellular divisions of an embryo occur without gaining mass, most of the following ones are linked to cell growth and are required for the correct development and […]