Iodized salt has been on the market for decades, but do you know why it is so important for you? Iodine deficiency is one of the most common causes of preventable mental retardation worldwide. Moderate to severe iodine deficiency is associated with reductions of 13.5 points in mean intelligence quotient (IQ). Iodine is an important […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Signals from Milky Way’s center may be from pulsars, not dark matter The abundance of gamma rays seen at the at the center of the Milky Way in data from the Fermi satellite may just be remnants of dead stars and not evidence of dark matter. Two separate research teams say signals coming from the […]
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 […]
Computer science • Condensed matter • Materials • Physics • Quantum physics
When quantum computing comes, it very likely will rely for the fast storage and processing of information on spintronics. Spintronics (from spin transport electronics) is a branch of technology that specifically makes use of quantum-mechanical spin, and especially of the transport of that spin, in electronic devices. Spin is the part of the total angular […]
Quantum mechanics represented a revolution in physics with implications in many other fields like chemistry and biology. It also conducted changes on some of the main scientific lines of thought, including a farewell to determinism. In the science before quantum mechanics probability was accepted only as a lack of knowledge from the system being studied […]
Author: Miguel A. Vadillo joined University College London in 2012 as a research associate after working more than ten years at the University of Deusto. Currently, he is a lecturer in decision psychology at the Department of Primary Care and Public Health Sciences, King’s College London. He also remains affiliated with UCL as an honorary […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Rats’ desires to go certain places revealed in their dreams Rats dream about places they want to go, according to a study published in eLife. Researchers showed an inaccessible treat to rats, then coaxed them to sleep in a comfortable nest, monitoring their brain activity, and when they woke, they went directly to the place […]
Back in 2001, the Human Genome Project gave us a complete readout of our DNA, unraveling that magic sequence of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts that contained all the information for making one of us. Thanks to that, we now know that in that sequence only 1.5% has information to make proteins, a fact that […]
It is likely that you have read somewhere that gravity is much weaker than the electromagnetic interaction. And it is true: for the electron and the proton gravity is 39 orders of magnitude weaker. Still what governs the movement of moons, planets, stars and galaxies is gravity; even the existence of dark matter is deduced […]
Since the cells were discovered with the advent of the microscope in the late seventeenth century, scientists have tried hard to find out what is going on into them. An avalanche of techniques and technologies emerged over the course of decades slowly discovering important molecular features of the cellular world to our knowledge and our […]