Most people have experienced how does it feel when dipping a finger into boiling water or swallowing while having tonsil inflammation. Pain may be annoying, but it is an essential protective mechanism because it warns us against potential tissue damage. This necessary role in survival is illustrated by the shortened life expectancy seen in individuals […]
Let’s try a little game. If I’d show you only parts of a famous building: a column, part of a wall, the ceiling…Would you be able to tell me which building it is I am telling you about? Most likely not. With these elements you could still doubt whether I am talking about an old […]
In a previous article I wrote about the high speed attacks of the mantis shrimps. However, my favourite feature of these crustaceans is their unique eyes. They have two apposition compound eyes, typical of many diurnal insects and crustaceans but unusual in how freely they can move on their stalks. The eye forms an image […]
Competition, evidence suggests, is a constant in nature. Looking from the largest to the smallest structures that Mankind has been able to observe, one can easily find examples: in clusters of galaxies (in which sometimes galaxies compete with each other to pull in the matter from their outer regions), stars (like binary systems with planetary […]
Biochemistry • Biomedicine • Molecular biology • Neurobiology
Nowadays we are more aware than ever about the relevance of eating a balanced and assorted diet. However, in the more industrialized countries obesity has become almost epidemic, and it is a condition that lies at the base of many different health issues, being the cardiovascular complications probably the most obvious. But also immunological and […]
As the Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi famously put it (although usually misattributed to Paul Erdös), mathematicians are devices for turning coffee into theorems. Other people drink coffee for a variety of reasons, and considering that coffee is very far from being the only popular beverage containing caffeine, it is not difficult to believe that caffeine […]
For any animal, the real world is an ever-changing environment. Continuously, even then they are just remaining in a peaceful, awake state, animals receive multiple sensory signals encoding different features of their surroundings, or even carrying information about their own internal state (orientation, body movement, or internal temperature, for example). Some of these signals might […]
The functioning of the human brain goes far beyond a bunch of cells packed together; each of them is able to produce, receive, and transform electrical signals into a concrete response that affects the neighboring cells, counted by hundreds. This image is already complex, but if we say that the electric signals are constituted by […]
If you were told something like “there is chemistry between us” , you certainly would not think that the speaker is referring to actual molecules flying across the space but, more appropriately, you would take it as a figurative way of talking. However, the saying turns to be more literal than it may seem: there […]
Cajal famously described the fly visual system as “stupendous, indeed disconcerting, and with no precedent in other animals”. By comparison, the vertebrate retina seemed “gross and deplorably simple”. Now we know that this simplicity is only apparent, but we can use the more clearly structured fly retina to help us study basic problems in visual […]