Imagine a bucket filled with hard spheres. As these spheres are free to pack together as closely as geometry allows they tend to adopt a close-packed structure, a structure in which there is least unfilled space. X-ray diffraction studies reveal that many metallic elements have close-packed structures. This simple fact explains a couple of very […]
Something weird is happening in Mexico these days. Two powerful earthquakes have hit the country in two weeks. The second one occurred exactly on the same date of the thirty-second anniversary of the most damaging quake known in the country and the early warning system did not work properly. Even more: two hurricanes are causing […]
We’ve known for decades there was a time when mammoths, saber-tooth cats, and other big mammals walked the Earth like it was no big deal. We also know that at some point of the Ice Age, a mass extinction made them disappear, leaving their fossils and their descendants as the only proof of their existence […]
Over geologic time scales, seawater transforms the basalt of the ocean floor by chemical attack. At the end of this alteration process, the basalt turns partly into clays and partly into dissolved salts in sea water. Lithium, a chemical element initially contained in basalt, will then be distributed between clay and seawater. This separation has […]
It is widely accepted that low carbon technologies will contribute to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mostly those coming from carbon dioxide, and thus slow down the global warming. That’s why most of the largest economies in the world have committed to reduce their gas emissions by supporting an unprecedented transition from the current fossil-fuel based […]
The Unknown Continent, t he White Desert. In the past only few -and brav e- people, such as Shackleton, Amundsen or Scott, dared to explore Antarctica. Nevertheless, in the fifties scientists started thinking that it was a very interesting place for doing research, due to its unique conditions, and started building more and more stations […]
Jones is a small city located in the state of Oklahoma, in the Central United States. In Science Magazine we can read that the town has one bar, three restaurants and nine churches. It looks like the perfect place for a truly peaceful holiday, doesn’t it? Too bad that our perception of Jones’s tranquility can […]
Is it possible to have an asymmetric magnetic field when all boundary conditions are known to be symmetric? The question seems awkward but the counter-intuitive reality is always there to make Science far more interesting, as revealed recently by Hao Cao and collaborators . Today’s story is a good combination of intriguing observations and amazing […]
Climate change due to global warming is usually presented as the Nemesis of our civilization. Day by day, evidences supporting temperature and sea level raise are presented. Numerical models point that CO2 concentration will lead to a new climate not very human friendly in what can be taken as the fastest ever climate change. Still […]
Let me tell you a story about serendipity in research , a story that involves the evolution of Earth’s landscape and floods of unprecedented scale. This is related to research of our own group here at CSIC . Classical authors such as Aristotle, Galileo, or Leonardo da Vinci, used to describe the birth of the […]