Intense flavors imprint our palate at every spoonful of Asturian fabada, an unquestionable cultural hallmark of Northern Spanish cuisine. Because of the present United Nations´ international year of pulses, we are visiting here some bits of the science about a food regime particularly rich in them. Beans, lentils, and chickpeas are feeding building blocks for […]
Today February 29th is celebrated worldwide the Rare Disease Day. This year’ slogan is “Join us in making the voice of rare diseases heard”. So this is my small contribution to such campaign, essential nowadays to increase support to all the people suffering those disorders and to their families. Because rare is the disorder but […]
They say that Information is power. Probably because having the knowledge, when the data are correct, it is essential to anticipate the right move that will lead to success. Today, several decades into the information age seems to be no doubt about that. Regardless, in matters affecting our health we find a tangible example of […]
More than a hundred years have passed since the German physicist Alois Alzheimer associated the traits of dementia of one of her patients with morphological changes in her brain after her death. While we know a great deal about what today is known as Alzheimer’s disease, we still need to answer two fundamental questions: what […]
A lot has been said and written about what makes women physically attractive, from having full lips and/or breasts to being shorter than a man, to having a symmetrical face to having a low waist-hip ratio (WHR), all being indicators, at least in theory, of potential reproductive fitness . For instance, a low WHR has […]
One of the first things that we are taught in school is that living things are born, grow, reproduce and die. We can think of aging as the line that connects these events, lifespan as the length of that line and senescence as the step that goes from reproducing to dying. The three terms bring […]
Increasing numbers of people are developing diabetes in our society and current predictions estimate that nowadays this disease affects about 9% of the whole population. As a consequence, health care systems in industrialized countries have developed many types of clinical interventions that prevent and treat classic complications of this disease and improve the lifetime and […]
Mayans considered chocolate to be the food of gods, something that is remembered in the scientific name of the cacao plant ( Theobroma cacao ). Although these presumably consumers are not any longer considered, c hocolate is an important dietary source of flavonoid antioxidants, which are hypothesized to have a beneficial effect on endothelial function […]
Since its discovery in 2003, graphene has become one of the “materials of the future”, with applications ranging from tissue engineering to energy storage. Recently, a paper published in Oncotarget by researchers at the University of Manchester has shown its potential in anti-cancer therapy, in addition to its already known applications in medicine as a […]
Alternative medicine is often promoted on the argument that it can do no harm. Even though its advocates are aware that its effectiveness has not been scientifically demonstrated, they do believe that it is harmless and therefore it should be used. “If not alone, you should at least use it in combination with evidence-based treatments” […]