He was a man of insatiable curiosity and a hallmark of modern multidisciplinarity. Yet he was born on an April day six centuries ago. He never attended university, and still he authored masterpieces in the history of art and cultivated a broad range of interests and skills. Distant domains such as painting, sculpture, technology and […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Photos reveal possible planet-forming disk around young star Photos taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, appear to show the birth of an alien planet similar to Earth along with other nascent worlds. The photos reveal a disk surrounding the star TW Hydrae that appears to have planets starting to form within it […]
The blood-brain barrier is one of the defenses of the central nervous system. It is made of a thin layer of endothelial cells closely fitted together by tight junctions, being a mandatory pass between the blood and the neural cells. Thus, this barrier, considered the last great biochemical barricade in the organism, separates the blood […]
A new vista in spintronics was opened in 2004 with the observation of the spin Hall effect in GeAs at 20 K by David Awschlom and his group. In the spin Hall effect the electrons of a charge current flow in a nonmagnetic conducting material in the absence of an external magnetic field. An applied […]
Plants reproduce sexually to ensure genetic variability and thus, to continuously evolve in a constantly changing environment. In angiosperms, flowers are the sexual organs and most angiosperms are hermaphroditic, this means they have bisexual flowers with both male and female organs (Figure 1). Stamens are the male part of the flower, they are filaments ended […]
New York, Madrid, London, Susa, Dikwa, Kuwait, Paris, Ankara, among many others…, and now Brussels. A disturbingly long list of cities that have suffered the appalling hit of terrorist attacks in recent years. And while passing over the shock, we can hardly avoid asking ourselves about what are the causes of such destructive behaviours. Beyond […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Synthetic cell with just 473 genes developed A synthetic cell containing just 473 genes, the smallest number of genes in any independent life form that exists in nature, has been developed by a team of scientists led by genomics expert Craig Venter. The functions of 149 of the genes in JCVI-syn3.0 are unknown. Nature Vivid […]
Suicide is one of the worst health and social problems in the modern world. Hundreds of millions of persons experience suicidal thoughts every year and between 10 and 20 millions went on to attempt suicide. In Spain, although the average risk is lower than in Northern countries, almost 4.000 persons die every year by their […]
Let’s take a p-type semiconductor with a very clean surface and place it right next to the clean surface of a n-type semiconductor. This type of device is called an n-p junction diode , or simply a diode . What happens? Scientists realized that the electrons in the conduction band of the n-type semiconductor are […]
PONTIUS PILATE And what about you? Do you find it…risible, when I say the name…Biggus… Dickus? (Monty Python’s Life of Brian) The human being is not the only animal that laughs, but very likely is the only one that laughs at something. Having the capacity for humour and finding it pleasurable is also one of […]