Category archives: Science

Mimicking Nature’s light-harvesting efficiency: the case of sulphur-bridged terthiophene dimers

Mimicking Nature’s light-harvesting efficiency: the case of sulphur-bridged terthiophene dimers

ChemistryCondensed matterEnergyMaterials

By DIPC

In nature, light harvesting organisms make extensive use of energy and electron transfer between adjacent molecules. Thus, in the photosynthetic cell of an algae, bacterium, or plant, there are light-sensitive molecules called chromophores, which contain a π-conjugated system (a system with alternate single and double bonds), arranged in an antenna-shaped structure named a photocomplex. When […]

Quantum Physics + Genetic Engineering = Enhanced Energy Transport

Quantum Physics + Genetic Engineering = Enhanced Energy Transport

BiologyGeneticsQuantum physics

By Daniel Manzano

A hot topic of research nowadays is the energy transfer in quantum systems. One important reason for this interest is the famous 2007 experiment that suggests quantum effects in the dynamics of the photosynthetic complex FMO, from the green sulfur bacteria . This complex plays a crucial role in natural photosynthesis transferring an excitation from […]

Metacognition in nonhumans

Metacognition in nonhumans

EthologyNeuroscience

By José Ramón Alonso

Metacognition is «cognition about cognition», or «knowing about knowing». It comes from the root word «meta», meaning beyond, and the word «cognition» that includes all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning, biological computation, problem-solving, decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc. Metacognition can take many forms; it […]

MI weekly selection #153

MI weekly selection #153

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

Nerve cells that block itches in mice Scientists have found nerve cells in mice that can block itches caused by a light touch, which could one day lead to treatments for people suffering from chronic itch problems. Researchers genetically engineered mice without those spinal cord nerve cells, producing rodents that had the urge to scratch […]

The geometry of String Compactifications (III): exploring the Calabi-Yau manifold

The geometry of String Compactifications (III): exploring the Calabi-Yau manifold

PhysicsTheoretical physics

By Carlos Shahbazi

In the previous articles (I, II), we have characterized the simplest class of supersymmetric heterotic compactification backgrounds. In particular, we have finished the second article with the following result: There is a class of admissible Heterotic internal manifolds characterized as being six-dimensional, oriented, spin, Riemannian compact manifolds admitting a parallel spinor respect to the Levi-Civita […]

Visualizing charge oscillations on a metal surface

Visualizing charge oscillations on a metal surface

Condensed matterMaterialsPhysicsQuantum physics

By DIPC

With “many-body problem” we usually make reference to one that is very difficult to obtain exact solutions for, because the system involves interactions between more than two bodies. This kind of problem appears both in classical and quantum systems. In order to understand the physics of many-body systems, it is necessary to make use of […]

MI weekly selection #152

MI weekly selection #152

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

Evidence of plague found in Bronze Age skeletons DNA testing of Bronze Age skeletons has found evidence of a plague outbreak that occurred thousands of years before the Black Death that devastated Europe in the 1300s. Researchers found enough Yersinia pestis DNA in skeletons that tested positive for the bacteria to produce complete genome sequences […]

Did the first Americans come from Bilbao?

Did the first Americans come from Bilbao?

AnthropologyArchaeologyGeneticsHistory

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

As everybody knows, the people from Bilbao are born wherever they want. And, according to one of the most captivating conjectures in contemporary archaeology, this might have been so in a totally unexpected way even from many millennia ago. The conjecture I am referring to is the ‘Solutrean hypothesis’ about the first human population of […]